





a a te he th ee 
= rr = 

















——— = (~ a ee 
=a pb i Se 
CS ee it 6 
fi et fe POSED AerENET ORES ESR ERNNETSRENE 
ret a eee oa aeeedlil erence een pee ne ners 
> pet" ee 
SOs Ne- pecrerinap ea eruaneeSnEETETeE 
t ae Bel ee re ea ASOT 
ae — : ~ — 
~ = =f ~ etna fet eee 
~ —— < oa. emma a cam ee et et ee 
(| oS ~ > HH fe aren een ree er aes 
~ pees ee Fas BA ———— ee eee 
= =| — NE ee meee 
ret ‘ ~ Cnt | 
. come 
io a ee - aS ~ 7 ee 
i ~s= 2st . eevee acta = oem et Samra 
| Se ee aR = nda eerie 
._f r ae ———e ate 
Lae Sppencinets |: lomeceetan  eeepeueterenc - MEdineEine - prebtmanee 
a a eee heme RRS eee eee 
ee | pnaemeitemme — haer meee SNE sere 
se HS i oose, aeenensalllllieeamnetinn! : 
SS ere eee oahenel = , 
ee en re ee ee renee ieee See x ~ be 
ee eens pie are een a! 
ee en eee MR ene S a <i = 
eee ee, rnin = es cy 
I atEAR Renn .< cpa oe apnea > penaermesd = hae 
ewe nme = a en = nee: Ss ——— 
Sa en em Rarearmnnant 
——— ln | ceed SS ees 
————— So ae Seemann enema ae pecogumenemanh, a 
a ee: SS = 5 eee ae Ais ores 
-—— a ee ee = ane | oth - aad 
CS ee See eee = 
Seip) Sacre een eaten - eee Kenna, a ———— a 
~ anaes Sr tert) ee’ P= 
<a | = Tae =a pape asmnnaatnnl | et - a8, 
| | ~ Si eters) malt g 
——. J we el ~ i, ent i . —e. 
=" wes = i, es wes 
* Boecanees oe we. Ngweorces hae 
wie a ee Se | ; on 
ee Re eran meee * ncn Moreeae, ~2" —"! ES . > 
EES eee arate . 2 SD coed 3 : Hs 
nage eRe empe are amin  teeiennl miseer¥e ~ . ieee spanas Ss Se 
Serene ene e Teen a eae Mpmarnel : ies SS - ees ah pence gr na NR a tent pennstemersrtr—— se cohen 
———————— ne SF i extn! a et SEED mc tee ap — 9 mn a A pn ap tanae nti ntenaneneetn nlite nese esta we ten enna onepaeneeemntrimasnsentrnsnenieerintnsteneerraenatneoetnenreinaemnansirettefenenerainteanteeresiera—  Seetinenienneetvene—ensewrit nes yore 
cacaieabeael omens | pein : 2 and ae : o> gra —— aa = . Pebabedonpmminesohnderpiataeeentense 
ear ee es hed : = - << eometfi buaven~-<--—~~—emengnes —— = fe eet paas scapa renee ier bepteeion eoeonssieieeaiontenerensanplonennpemnnsenpnncpetnimenan pe petansaeemeraaaenqnpsenrelney ema penaent neces ~ a 
le elchaiaiiantatndiiadembonndiitinsiamaned ices ee “ - — “ es - i. -~ - - ~ a 
ee see = - = — x : ——— = mma 
SST ee ee ae peel — ~ permae armen cre G) = roar (ommmee re 
Seeeeecemnaans See eee i SSS —e 
pemnmecenney a ——— | Sana’ [anne senrevenenreadan -senguenewanes 
aerate panne, a eee meme ae ee ae 
a ee eee ee ee! : res SSS 
a ee meer eet z So nb tl 
— = t SS eS - ——— 
oe = . fapetenpeese beedestypheneanenes 
a  —  ——e oan — 
: lh contetentensenatateteiemneadillllinaatenaemnanttttameamemmendy i — a ae 
Soelsannensneserseawecneeeres [pacenetn aE seaas : See en 
ae Semmens cenit Oo ee—E 
See —_—— De 
ee ee ee ay eS ee 
ee ee ~—" Sees ae —— 
Sn omen + Se ee 
ao ee mene Sateen a —— - 
ar, = eS = —, 
oe ee nn ee ne Be 
eo — a ee # eet ere 
Socata, Geampenesbkes (rassniand speareel Py See <x. Waele 
Seana Slsaeenh henereials ee japeeeed  Soaeeeeel 4 * Sedehnecens , SRRiiple. . mensanbonemn 
—— — ee ee en ee eee 
— spc Pi ciilstencceneed iirenoemens rn, eet peers 
snieatieinseeT a ! Sa | ea eee 
ee ee ee  annnintaemene pe an 
scan coves — — —— noel NE ae 
eae ee ee — SS ens ce eeetemenematet en er 
aterm bee ee eee eee ee reieeatetetibaiien  pemenmmnenete 
——— ee ee ee ee eed —— peggy) re enniwtes 
ooeserrerrmms.. sever fee eer Serer emanates <scn< _Adeeonaenn 
: wetepi iat tae  iepeceecerl Ep emesanerernely, <= tage -seeseernas 
ESAT RGSS STITT SOE NSS FURS NEE ILLS eh EY SSE Sepparesunerserey, orev —-> emeoosraaras 
nee = eet alent Seana es 
———— | lw fm eccetas  eapeeee] ae fae 
EF NS! jeer! eet FRE i ee ee 
Se ee eee ee pare aweerysnrter henhar thar nnSwrees 
———— ee ee Pasnirs anes meme ah wt er taak bo emesis 
——— a | TTT eT ee tn , eee 
Smeatonpeswe ‘SSeamebeeneee Tee a Se BR SR) or me 
Lamers: See t SS eS ~~ a 
a > ———— ff = Bh oe or Hf ree owen 
Lmanadetensend > —— 3 . SS 
Ce ne! ee tne ene - = ae oe 
Ser teen (REPRE ee <a OIE ERI CT OTE LTE NOT csearenreeee won werent pameane 
ee Nm em ama | tnentnrerimeeninn ingens — ymmpnbetns Sv vetted ow eeenanne 
$e SS eee: mene WENT CNEY ESS RSNICE RSET TETRSRNT SORA NOURI TESST LST SSS SEED SOEN 
een oo anne seenes Ber halted POE SET RENEE PE STREETER EINES. AW SLE TERMS SP TYEE URES EROS 
amen 5S SR See eerie epee aL Oa et PONCE OSEA VED SHO ITNEEE SU 
re es nenraenespeeenedllitiaenaiilianeeaasa aecenelinestl aeaemenananedllinane mammal ~ -- Pea T ENT SERS ESET PNUNT ae eaN 
——— a a Sa fete ieee RAED AERTS REEL RE AP DROSE EDT TTL ASIN ONS TAT OE RT peuawreee 
ee a i a fn : [ was erenesnncerner eran mEeeR ena. 
mpreneaepnna omy SS . epee rteeenepttnetin | peecennnan 
a eee eeewene ere : : Seger ae  peatneeeieenipteedi> | pengernaieng 
oe hn a  oeeetet acsarel | tenei eens 
——— A an Ser Saree nt Sunes renee +r + ene 
—} | i Sener jennie > me 
| apa | annette! s . > j > << — | aa 
A et eee 5 s a es 
re ee earn intnS TURNS INR N ENYCE SENN SNES S HSER TAA TR TCES AOL E TERT Cae aS RET 0 ST STEEL ET APSNS STE 
het, erp sent haphw ete epee nepenreet " ng We gata oro Sr 
eat | Sanh se eeenetioha” . Nepean  eeepeeter " ce he | pee 
—) > —— a | ri ceseaunnr? i pecgadipanseereioseeonsemssantoncansonvicouwesaanevessasen tewsseustesammuprenatverctatsiarequnraenasnaeenweeunsrenannsenesnsthoantsseorstencrer® SU SE eee PS ee 
ner |: : —parees  eckeoree - vow Hp norewto anne 
—— ower a — = - ancaeeel 
a ae enn TicanihteterttaeiitneneeeeraataneseaaasAanemn eheneteenene | pammamea 
ST ee : A a pene oe 
Sawa. FoRURt ASSLT DSRS Oe PERSIA ASSESS wer ena netei chow bsg mine ae 
Soe a ee ere wiearomp artists WAPDSRATRI SERIA RE LOS eina te coaeatbaceinjaiescanwecersaacdines _ paraennpehbdapetaties hae rman 
Se gCE NEED NET SE ESTO OR SUNDER SE CORIO O TIRES SERN UTUEE A NOUN SES SNR NU SRE NIST ASRS SANS TLS TEATS TSAR eS SAG Rewet atNO? Sete e mS NET ESR NS aa 
SIS CAeEASTTEEEOOOTEN STEERED | COMES ne ened eens oe. ae \ eens 
Leet EC MEEO STORER | ROUTE SSS yeas ae nee cd omens Aig bogie awrneee 
suarsenancins Sopris pe weet veiberenel 2 RS ee ne Oe le fates edad tpn | emeeichaiewent 
—cleaeeeeare — deaepenenecinet  Wyamemabed (enmmpihl eee ers rma ee eg eee 4 ried a | Shepeebion 
Pewee <whabeeremin domme  comebinbe — iderienasinal spans <STDIN> FT ene pA 0 a | 
re SP ee ee readin ee oan * Tenaga ane Sa OF AT, _— te Pelee tle est | arnt ae ne 
eee eee . = - - = . - (een =- Ss ve xan “ aan pecans SS eave yea Nien eee 
he a ee tee > < Z = > - = _ ore - ea = ~- ty = a as eer es ~ EA eLearn tn ee eee 
Sn ee : — : Rearpaare =o ¥ roar eae F ie - | taboos 
oneal albnmenbnse Neate meaner ao" —_ Se a ees = 9 eae Com nee roernmmng 
EN ee NR hae ewes Fe a AEE ee ee ate hy AG pot wenirmne 
Dass sere ——— — ee Seine — pene ef Tt sect <8ks han eh apaneened 
soeessuansene) ee keer san sre eee, panei 
NO ee nr we ee _ ner ere ED ree 
ee eee aaieeeteliandetneinenanenens titties anmummemameallimanemenaens ea - I cp cin sari ee ee 
a rep en ee eee ae — oo paneer’ a 
a X 2 = eT nnn men 
a >So ‘ rs =3 aa, ge ah. een 
———awe -...._.. en laombenee | Sneneeee s mele % ; Ben le OH  eepeeee 
ape SESE uiraeine §— nhrieleteeie! . = 3 = < See eee 
pe et ee ee 7 a Se - “Se 
ave prseertansest a ees Sete 2 =“ ky = <a < een 
aa eenieemtentee — beeimederd ren 3 o-sphinchmnnte dod | Anaetebnantinaed 
~eoheomes pis. eee eed on edo pumpasee 
poewuenn : RS cecesecan Gas hese~ S : i frevecerenve 
wena PN ; Sh 
sooges « jet pneeepaanette sepeaepes prepared = 3 Gee eich ea) adaeenhe Simmons 
ee | itinpnangaeeaae eboney sap nde EE) Stare 45 Srreearesi wwe aeaerenen 
ethene eaters faeeenes | hmnthnrrpene 5 SP ete te tar nee at wr ena meroanare: 
on dupebhgoepiranerperers onaremed ssenbmeed 2 , . pth nietereconmensbeetarstterantanpereenin 
San cepeeprseresaeaanes Saepeey SaCeENee Souoenpess EnbarNenawes 
ee eee eegapereas  inppemes opnpneeed deere pr meer anseted 
Rae. Steehnimeeeeeente?  Semnennan —<enpeepenl peepee tpbe arateecantomed 
etd epee aes ane fos see reve sesc cs too svesteeaas oman Sarees 2 nnecb entero 
ee | teppei beeen wala * ” peeniongen pbshene-yooneie 
x ee anes peressunteSnnar area tw 
= . coer noes a paoet saeayIRes a 6 eeany oS UEP ori 
awe Le raas rans LER OT eds a ~ conte to a remeDey ahh Bat owy ae mveaw 
eee TN - - n 2 see — Cee Poet OU OREN a WOU RTRETRS 
———————— eat eet a a —— -_ — —s Sl a Ciscoe weaseerece meres 
Sgunea paoetqu steve saswsaraeasunsoareyece:-sapear seats cnapsaarweussasesersauoedsin ren cea ns sate wre Rese Wien oe Oar tee ote e yar aS ToS a ae Ou ee ees Ree eet peonehraseret awe aeaetT ys penereSaereasSTESDaNeS 
aiociesscsepdcnssentetuaoepescnsenasstivesaqapanathertetenearcnstone hemes iyscstacshuiesessansesssevara lonssavewamamenanawwesesnancsewanirqes yn eur ata/EIYSELEESLETERET TOS SU TEARL ADEE OU USOT NETS epkvaxpeved uwe-sousl a raLsees Hany RrwERaDEeNe weeEre 
OOMAESSS SEG CUAL RA TRAGER ORI RES SEN CAL URGREL ERIE ESET AS SousEpeNmES ene seaANhTeSTelSEETs a pa ee a eee anette - Ricexsee ae 
SRL TO AT FR he en PE ene Bs aed EEN ed ETE ODA ERS PIERS Sed 4 ETE AEE NEE ots It? FEY 1 EAR RMON ARDC S AN BECK O parle era ale Ms Wo GEE ae 2 KOT AD EE SOF FRETS 











, 


ei 


i 


eas staan 
1 » 4 ery 





OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


By ISABEL BROWN ROSE 


‘Red Blossoms 


A Story of 
Western India 


‘Interesting both as a novel and as a 
description of life as the missionaries 
live it in India.” 

—Continent 


‘The story of perplexity and struggle 
is told with real skill—of love, sacrifice 
and hope.” 

—Christian Endeavor World 


“Mrs. !Rose’s first venture in story 
writing is eminently a success. This 
book should be read by StupENnT VoL- 
UNTEERS and by all young people who 
are ilooking forward to missionary 


work.” 
—Fames L. Barton, i . 
Secretary A.B. CF M. 


Cloth, $1.75 





Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/ourparishinindia0Orose 





ViTHoBA, . . . HE ForceETS How MANY Murpers Her Com- 

MITTED BECAUSE HE CANNOT Count FURTHER THAN Four! 

Now AN Exper or His LitrLe Cuurcu, AND GREATLY 
BELOVED. 


OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


Lights and Shadows of Missionary Life 


ee An. 
an \ OF PRINCE PS 
Or ‘Oy 


By 4 


wv 
ISABEL BROWN ROSE 
Of the American Marathi Mission, Sholapur, 
Bombay Presidency, India. Author of 
‘*Red Blossoms,” etc, 





ILLUSTRATED 


New Yorr CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LoNDON AND EpINBURGH 


Copyright, MCMXXVI, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 99 George Street 


Zo 
RICHARD 
A Good Comrade and a Good Scout 





FOREWORD 


COUPLE of missionaries, whom we shall 

call Rev. William Wilberforce and his wife 

Betty, lived for several years in a remote 
and conservative town in Western India which we 
shall call Barispoor. It seemed to me that their 
ups and downs, their adventures gay and grave 
and sometimes gruelling, showed a cross section 
of human life, and especially of missionary life 
of sufficient interest to justify its narration. I 
have, therefore, gathered together Betty’s descrip- 
tions and allowed her to tell in her own words her 


simple, unvarnished story. 
ie ive 
Sholapur, India. 


ay 
may 
i, 


‘i 7% : 
f 7 ; 7 Mv h \ 
BL wan) 
gee 


4) 
a, 


id a 
aa 





CONTENTS 


I. Our INDIAN “ HomME Sweet Home” - 
Ey MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING Ls - 
III. FRIENDS AND FOES OF THE ANIMAL 

KINGDOM - . a em 
IV. THE Daity Rounp, THe UNcommMon 

TASK - ~ = BE s C 
ie MISSIONARY MoviEs - fe ni dg 
Mile THE PEOPLE AMONG WHOM WE DwWELT 


VII. A PILGRIMAGE TO PANDHARPUR- - 


VIII. TuHroucH THE DEEP WATERS Ss f 


EX: FAMINE, DISEASE, AND DEATH - ut 
xX: CHIEFLY ABOUT WEDDINGS 4 o 
xT: PAYING OurR RESPECTS TO THE “ MOTHER 

OF HARTH is i a nd ah 


XII. ComMmMuUNION SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY - 
XIII. THRouGH THE FiERY FuRNACE - at 


XIV. FurtoucyH! = \. ih st a 





ILLUSTRATIONS 


VITHOBA, ONCE A MuRDERER, NOW A 
CHRISTIAN ELDER - - - Frontisptece 


A. VILLAGE BAZAAR - - - - ait 3) 


Tue Water-Burrato—A MArRvVELLous MILK- 
FACTORY = a - - - ~ 48 


SAVED FROM STARVATION—Now HiGH ScHOOL 
STUDENTS - ~ - ~ ~ at iiZO 


PILGRIMS TO PANDHARPUR- - ~ - - 98 


THe Otp Lapy WuHo MOoOTHERED THE SPAR- 


ROWS - - - - - - ~ 126 
A Group OF OUTCASTE CHRISTIANS - -~ 156 
A BeEautiFuL MosQguE IN ouR PARISH - ai (178 


vie 


{ 


ba ne AY 
oi ty Si fi Leas 
he nt ON 


cep e 





I 
OUR INDIAN “HOME SWEET HOME” 


‘ ,' Y HEN Bill and I turned in at the gate of 
our new domain we heaved a great sigh 
of relief, for things looked actually 

green. 

We had travelled all night by train from Bom- 
bay, and in the early morning had changed to a 
dinky, little, light railway whose fussy engine 
swept us along at breakneck speed and accom- 
plished the twenty-one miles from the junction in 
just over two hours. The dingy station was 
swarming with strangely-clad brown figures with 
unbeknown brown faces, out of which big, brown 
eyes looked us over curiously and made us feel that 
we must have tumbled out by mistake at some way- 
side halt in some other planet. We didn’t seem 
to “ belong.” 

But we had valiantly climbed into a rickety 
horse-tonga and had been recklessly hurled along 
an even road hedged with dusty prickly pear 
bushes, and then through ugly streets of ugly mud 
houses and ramshackle open shops. We had 
dodged stray bullocks and water buffaloes and 
herds of goats and swarms of sprawling babies. 


With a fearful sinking somewhere in the region 
13 


14 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


of my entirely inexperienced heart, 1 had won- 
dered whether our home would be in such sur- 
roundings and whether we must endure day and 
night the unlovely sights, sounds and smells now 
so much in evidence, to say nothing of the white 
dust'and' the glare: And then?) Seid ttre ton 
of open road led to a substantial iron gate, and we 
swung into a big compound with refreshing green 
trees and shrubs, with brilliant flowers and bushes, 
and with a tinkling fountain playing in front of 
the bungalow! | 

I hope no one will imagine that a fountain in 
the garden is a sime-qua-non of missionary life—a 
wicked luxury demanded by us unreasonable and 
pampered exiles. It just happened that the Baris- 
poor bungalow was on the market because the 
Light Railway Company had moved its headquar- 
ters down to the junction. There was no rush 
for even this “ desirable property ” in a town boast- 
ing not a single white person; so the whole com- 
pound of two acres, with a good bungalow, a dozen 
one-roomed houses, a big well and numerous trees 
and bushes (to say nothing of the aforesaid 
fountain with four out of its six jets in working 
order) was knocked down for a mere song, and 
became the property of our Mission and an out- 
station for district work. 

Our garden was a beautiful, restful place, and 
we loved it in its varied garb in the varied seasons 
of the year. In the fountain grew aquatic plants 


OUR INDIAN “HOME SWEET HOME” 15 


including a white lily, and round about it were 
croton bushes, sisal plants, and neem trees. At the 
right was a short avenue of tall, graceful cork- 
trees. In the fall—that is, the end of the rainy 
season—they put forth their delicate, white, in- 
verted blossoms, pendent like a bride’s bouquet, 
and when a slight breeze shook them the fragrant 
petals would fall on us as though in benediction. 
A clump of stumpy banana palms had bunches of 
fruit that would change from an unripe bright 
green to a mellow yellow if we could protect them 
from the predations of both human and bird ma- 
rauders. A solitary pomegranate bush boasted a 
few scarlet blossoms that quarrelled with the flar- 
ing purple bougainvilea beside it. The great 
spreading gold mohur trees put out their geranium- 
red blossoms and brightened the dry and colourless 
landscape in the hot weather, and their immense 
fern-like leaves and heavy seedpods made welcome 
patches of green all the year round. From July 
till October the arches of the verandah were cov- 
ered with pink antigonum; and as it faded off there 
came clumps of white and pink cosmos, yellow and 
red cannas, multi-coloured zinnias, and a few 
amaryllis. ‘There was also a silkworm-less mul- 
berry tree and a bush of fragrant jasmine. We 
also tried a vegetable garden which was hardly an 
unqualified success but which gave us a great deal 
of fun and pleasure; and with imported seeds we 
managed from time to time to get a few peas, 


16 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


beans, and heads of corn, some lettuce, radish and 
such-like. 

The compound was a perfect paradise for birds, 
On a branch of the gold mohur tree that dipped 
towards the fountain, a perky kingfisher used to 
perch, motionless but alert for the metallic flash 
of an infinitesimal fish in the water below. Like 
a lightning flash of blue and brown he would sud- 
denly swoop down and seize and gobble up his 
prey. Then he would shake the water out of his 
gaudy plumage, shake his beak contentedly, and 
fly up to his vantage point again with an air of 
smug complacency. 

A pompous crow-pheasant used to wake us every 
morning with his stentorian trumpeting, and in a 
neighbouring compound a couple of peacocks 
would screech in token of coming rain. Then, as 
we sat out of doors at our “ little breakfast’ we 
would watch a dignified eagle take up his post on 
the topmost point of the tallest cork-tree and sur- 
vey in the majesty of isolation the puny world be- 
neath him. Green parakeets would flit restlessly 
among the trees, and now and again with a raucous 
chattering would suddenly take flight and sail off 
to some distant haunt with the sure, swift sweep 
of miniature monoplanes. Merry little gray bul- 
buls with black crests and with red spots under 
their tails built their nests in our antigonum. They 
would watch with scintillating eyes the movements 
of any two-legged intruders, and by their very 


OUR INDIAN “HOME SWEET HOME” 17 


flutterings and sputterings would draw attention to 
the fact they were trying to hide. Black and white 
sparrows, crested hoopoes, cooing pigeons, chat- 
tering mynas, occasional woodpeckers, and numer- 
ous and varied butterflies, made our compound a 
gay and melodious spot. 

The bungalow itself was a whitewashed, one- 
storeyed affair, as uninterestingly symmetrical as 
a doll’s house, with one good-sized public room 
with a serving-room behind, and on each side of 
these, exactly one office, one bedroom, one dress- 
ing-room, and one bathroom. Even the builder 
had evidently been struck by the uninspiring pro- 
portions, for with a wild flight of imagination he 
had tried to relieve the squat appearance by adding 
a little wooden room on top of each front corner. 
The flat roof between these turrets made an ex- 
cellent sleeping-porch, and was reached by a flight 
of steep stone steps back of the bungalow, and a 
rickety wooden gallery which gave us many a 
thrill. 

_ We had but few guests in Barispoor for it was 
on the road to nowhere, and we missed the crowds 
of visitors passing through Bombay on their way 
either to or from the homeland. We appreciated 
it when good friends made a special journey to 
see us, and many a tired missionary came for a 
complete rest-cure. We once had a stranded Eng- 
lishman-——an agent ‘for Singer’s sewing machines— 
who had expected to put up at the Travellers’ 


18 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


Bungalow but had found it an unfurnished barn. 
He stayed for the week-end and was much inter- 
ested in all that he saw. He was amazed that 
we could talk with the “natives” in their own 
language and that Bill actually preached in it! 

We also entertained a distinguished American 
professor who came far out of his way to look up 
his old seminary student. To save him the fatigue 
of the Light Railway journey, Bill went down to 
the junction on Redbird, his motorcycle, secure in 
the possession of a new tyre from Bombay. But 
alas, the new tyre proved a snare and a delusion. 
Within five miles of home the butt-ended tube col- 
lapsed. It was mended and served for a couple of 
miles and then gave out hopelessly. ‘The little toy- 
train swept past in triumph as Bill struggled with 
it by the roadside; and the distinguished professor, 
who was a good sport, cheerfully walked the re- 
maining three miles while Redbird followed in hu- 
miliation later on in a bullock-cart. 

Our guest-room saw some queer sights. It was 
used as a classroom for enquirers who, like Nico- 
demus of old, came for instruction “by night,” fear- 
ing to come out openly. It sheltered a man fleeing 
for his life from his enraged relatives. Bolted and 
barricaded, it witnessed the performance of a 
clandestine wedding while the mob outside thirsted 
for the bridegroom’s blood. Yes, isolated and 
lonely though we were, we never lacked thrills of 
one kind or another. 


OUR INDIAN “HOME SWEET HOME” 19 


Barispoor itself is an extremely dirty, desolate 
and depressing town. Although there are weav- 
ing, spinning and ginning mills and other signs of 
Western civilization, the people are bigoted and 
unresponsive. Our Christian community was 
small, miserably poor and with practically no 
prestige among the townsfolk. At one time the 
Christians numbered exactly fifty-seven, and as 
each one of them was a distinct “ variety ’’ we con- 
veniently called them our “ Heinz”! Life in Baris- 
poor itself was discouraging. Nowadays, I often 
marvel how I managed not only to settle down, 
but actually to enjoy life and keep busy and cheer- 
ful in that forlorn spot for four years. Was it 
the grace of God or merely the enthusiasm of a 
comparatively young and entirely new bride? A 
little of both, perhaps. 

When, as frequently happened, Bill was sud- 
denly called up to the district and I remained be- 
hind, I was not only the only white woman but 
the only white person in that town of twenty thou- 
sand inhabitants and for miles around. Fortu- 
nately I never had any nerves and never developed 
any, yet it seemed wise to take various precautions. 
I slept upstairs on the porch with a positive toy- 
shop under the pillow—a policeman’s whistle, a 
Swiss cow-bell, a box of matches, and a bunch of 
keys. By my side, under the mosquito-net, re- 
posed a hefty cane, and under the bed was chained 
my harmless puppy. The night watchman, an an- 


20 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


cient man of peace, made occasional rounds, and 
the flicker of his lantern, the tap of his stick and 
his unnecessary cough—he wanted me to know he 
was on the job—were a real comfort, even though 
I felt sure that at the first sign of danger he would 
rush to his own little house and lock himself in! 

But work in and around Barispoor was, I am 
glad to say, the lesser and the less important half 
of our job. Our real objective was the district, 
and we loved it. Oh, the joys of the open road; 
‘the lure of the great, wide, rolling prairie; the wind 
sweeping over the endless stretches of barren land; 
the long treks in the scorching sun by foot, by 
cycle, or on horseback with a peep of our tem- 
porary home, the little peaked roof of a Travellers’ 
Bungalow, or a group of tents gleaming white 
through the trees! 

Bill and I adored camp life. To leave Barispoor 
with its towny problems and its dirt and depres- 
sion, and to start out on a month’s tour in God’s 
open air, was like setting off on a holiday. ‘The 
days were strenuous but full of interest. We 
would visit around in the villages, encouraging our 
poor and needy Christian parishioners. We would 
search out promising youngsters to send to our 
Mission boarding schools to get a good chance in 
life. We would try to rouse the people to want a 
school in their village, and teach them “ some bet- 
ter thing” than the worship of their little brass 
gods and goddesses, the stone images in the tem- 


OUR INDIAN “HOME SWEET HOME”. 21 


ples, and the red-painted stones by the wayside. 
The missionary can often save the weak from the 
oppressive hand of the strong, and he is always 
trying to raise the outcastes from their servitude 
and their ‘appalling disabilities. In fact, he tries to 
make life just a little easier and brighter by intro- 
ducing ideas of the Fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man, and all the benefits they bring 
in their train. 

It was a strange life—to live in the midst of a 
strange people trying to give them new lamps for 
old. Following a hard day out in the dirty vil- 
lages we would relax, out-of-doors, after dinner, 
enjoying the refreshing and cooling night wind, 
looking up through the silhouettes of waving 
branches to the great starry heavens. From the 
nearest village—just distinguishable by pinpoints 
of light, came the reverberations of big drums 
beaten at some pseudo-holy festival. We often 
thought how little we knew or could ever know or 
guess, of the inner life of an Indian village. Here 
were we, strangers within the gates, with a dif- 
ferent background, a different culture, different 
ideals and ambitions, a different outlook on life, 
death and the hereafter. How negligible was our 
impact on the stolid wall of immemorial custom 
and prejudice! And at times like those it was a 
comfort to remember that the destiny of India lay 
in mightier Hands than ours. 


II 
MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING 


hy ‘ N YHAT-FOR pudding to-night, mem- 
sahib? ” 
ORT Vdon't knows “Krishna: 
What do you think?” Thus a weary memsahib 
so harassed with mission problems that she can’t 
scare up enough of a brain-wave to decide on any- 
thing so mundane as a pudding. There may be 
half a dozen brown folks—mostly suppliants— 
waiting on the verandah to waylay her. She may be 
due at her class in school in five minutes. She 
may be wrestling with ways and means to feed and 
clothe her family of eighty Indian boys. She may 
be working down through a pile of correspond- 
ence. Anyway, the problem of a pudding is just 
the last straw, so she gives it up, while visions of 
canned peaches and apricots and ice-cream sodas 
and maple nut sundaes float before her weary eyes 
like the delectable delicacies of an inaccessible para- 
dise. 
Krishna, standing by the desk, looks thoughtful 
for a minute. Then with a sudden inspiration he 
announces “ Bo-manage.” And his memsahib 


gratefully agrees. 
22 


MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING 23 


You would no doubt wonder what a “ bo-man- 
age” could be, but at dinner-time you would enjoy 
the delicious blanc-mange—one of Krishna’s spe- 
cialties. 

Krishna—bless him !—has been our guide, philos- 
opher and friend, and incidentally our cook, for 
over seven years. He supplies spice not only to 
the food but to life in general, and he is as expert 
at serving up philosophy as fried cakes. When in 
doubt, call K—that has many times been our watch- 
word. For, you see, Krishna is an imperturbable 
optimist. No matter what crisis, domestic or 
otherwise, sweeps into the daily routine, he is ready 
for it; and his wide, all-embracing smile is an im- 
mediate guarantee that everything will be all right. 
And it usually is, for he is also a peptomist—and 
does things. 

Our beloved Krishna is a “ boy ” of about forty- 
five, and was (be ready for shock) a bigamist. 
For a Hindu there was nothing amiss in this. The 
“ married” wife and her three children live with 
him, while the “other” wife and her boy were 
with her own people, sixty miles away. But this 
secondary wife died not long ago, so Krishna 1s 
now restored to respectability according to our 
standards and is a model paterfamilias. Though 
still outwardly a Hindu, he is one of the finest 
Christians we have had the good fortune to know, 
with a kindly spirit and a lovable disposition. 

Krishna has shared many experiences with us— 


24 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


heat and cold, hunger and thirst, tragedy and com- 
edy. We have watched with him by the side of his 
only daughter, a child of three, dying of pneu- 
monia. ‘Together we have nursed influenza pa- 
tients, and have stood by the funeral pyres of dead 
Flindu friends. ‘Together we have chased obstrep- 
erous bullocks and buffaloes and have hunted wild- 
cats out of the compound and have killed poison- 
ous snakes and spiteful scorpions. ‘Together we 
have tramped over rough roads and stony paths, 
through ploughed fields and dried watercourses. 
Together we have waded through swollen streams 
and have been drenched by torrential rains. ‘To- 
gether we have hunted the hill antelope and have 
brought home the bacon. And at the end of a hard 
day’s journey in the broiling heat of a tropical sun, 
Krishna’s first effort would be a cup of tea for his 
tea-loving mistress. 

With Krishna we have had many things in com- 
mon, including the umbrella. Our supply of um- 
brellas ran out, but there was no society to be 
shocked by our unorthodoxy, so we all—the sahib 
and I and Krishna—used up my old parasols. 
Many a time did I chuckle to see my ancient and 
dilapidated blue and white silk sunshade wave 
above Krishna’s white turban as he returned from 
the bazaar, protecting, not him, but his numerous 
purchases—meat and potatoes and bananas and 
eggs and vegetables all tied up in a towel. But at 
last the parasol got too shabby for his dignity, so 


MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING 25 


we gave him about a dollar to buy an umbrella, 
with the stipulation that if sahib or I were going 
anywhere in particular he would let us have the 
loan of it! 

An Indian cook-room seldom looks spick-and- 
span. American housewives, accustomed to tiled 
kitchens and cabinets and porcelain sinks and nickel 
fittings and shiny aluminum ware, would squirm 
at the sight of the cook-room begrimed with smoke 
and adorned with more or less battered pots and 
pans. The usual apparatus is a series of brick fire- 
places built on a stone shelf about three feet from 
the ground. The oven is a strong iron pot upon 
whose lid hot coals are placed. The only fuel in 
our part of the country is wood. The cook sticks 
an immense log into the fire and pushes it farther 
and farther in as it burns away. He hates to light 
the fire, so he keeps it going all day, and your wood 
smoulders pleasantly away from morning till night 
whether a meal is being cooked or not. 

Indian ideas of cleanliness are so delightfully ir- 
responsible that even the best cook needs a watch- 
ful eye on him occasionally. In bachelor establish- 
ments terrible things have been known to happen, 
such as frying-pans being used for foot-baths and 
grimy hands for ladles. It was also a bachelor 
sahib who detected a quite peculiar flavour in his 
soup one night. He sent for his cook and asked 
what new seasoning he had used? 

“ Nothing new, sahib,” the cook assured him. 


26 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


“Then what did you strain it through? ” 

“Through one of your socks, sahib.” 

“Through one of my socks?” thundered the 
master in wrath. 

“Please don’t be angry, sahib,’ murmured the 
cook humbly. “I didn’t take one of your good 
socks. It was just an old, dirty one!” 

Fortunately for us, our friend Krishna is com- 
paratively extremely clean and is extremely expert 
in the culinary arts. His magic shows to best ad- 
vantage in camp, where three stones steadied 
against a convenient tree form his impromptu 
kitchen range, by means of which he can produce 
a tempting dinner at the shortest notice. Imagine 
a black Indian night with a few stars feebly strug- 
gling to shine through the thick clouds. Here and 
there spots of light from the lanterns hung on the 
tent-poles show up the ghostly outlines of the white 
tents, and of the now empty carts that brought the 
equipment, and the bullocks grazing round or de- 
vouring the dried grain stalks put before them. 
Under a tree at a little distance squats Krishna, his 
kindly brown face lit up by the flickering glow 
from his little wood fire, while he stirs some mys- 
terious mixture that will by and by become meta- 
morphosed into first-class soup. Fuzzle, our canine 
philosopher, is nosing round in the region of the 
appetizing aroma and getting an occasional pat 
from his crony, Krishna. Village folks sit round 
watching all the queer apparatus and asking ea- 


MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING 27 


gerly about this strange white man and woman 
who have come to tell them about a new religion. 
Krishna discourses volubly on the Jesus-way, he 
being a real though unrecognized follower of it. 
Many a fine exposition have we heard him give to 
his Hindu visitors. And once, when we took a 
little Christian boy to help in camp we would hear 
Krishna the Hindu, every night before they went 
to sleep in their tent, prompting the little Christian 
in his devotions and joining with him in the Lord’s 
Prayer. 

Let me introduce my friend the dhobie, an el- 
derly and dignified patriarch clad in immaculate 
white who will make an obeisance with the air of 
royalty. 

He is most familiar to me in the attitude of 
squatting on the floor, counting out the e-shirts 
and the e-skirts and the e-socks and the e-stockings 
and other e-sundries, which he then ties up in an 
e-sheet. He steadies the enormous bundle on his 
head, makes his best salaam, and departs with ma- 
jestic tread. 

In a week or so (usually or so) he will return 
with the same clothes washed and starched and 
ironed and neatly folded—extremely neatly folded. 
Your esthetic pleasure over the neatness of the 
folding will quickly evaporate when you discover 
that all the rents and frayed edges and buttonless 
buttonholes have been skilfully concealed within 
the folds, in the fond hope that they may escape 


28 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


your eagle eye until the author of them is out of 
reach. 

The dhobie’s modus operandi accounts largely 
for the damage. He takes your washing to the 
nearest river or pool—balanced in two enormous 
bundles pannier-wise on either side of a wretched 
donkey or a bullock. ‘Then he selects a nice, big, 
sharp stone. Wetting one or two items of cloth- 
ing, he holds them firmly in his right hand, flings 
them high in the air, and then, with a dexterous 
twist of the wrist, brings them down squarely on 
the stone in the manner of a flail. This strenuous 
treatment combined with the acid in which he has 
soaked the clothes all night—though he always de- 
nies knowledge of any such thing—ensures snowy 
whiteness, but at horrible cost. Your linen wears 
to shreds in no time—but that is not the dhobie’s 
affair! 

There are two ruling passions in every dhobie’s 
life, a passion for marking ink and a passion for 
buttons, these two passions being complementary 
to each other in that the one is constructive and 
the other destructive. Like an artist presented 
with a blank canvas and a new box of paints, he 
will attack with avidity every new article of attire 
that reaches him. No matter how carefully your 
linen is marked with embroidery or woven initials 
or what not, the dhobie sniffs at such delicate 
modes of discrimination and revels in placing his 
own really distinctive and unmistakable hiero- 


MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING 29 


glyphic upon it. As it is necessary that his mark 
should jump quickly to the eye; he naturally 
chooses the collar of a waist or the stiff front of a 
dress shirt or the initial corner of a handkerchief 
or some other equally prominent spot on which to 
imprint with loving emphasis his special cipher— 
in our case a sprawling cross. As he uses really 
indelible ink the mark may be depended upon to 
outlast the garment. 

Buttons are ephemeral possessions when en- 
trusted to the dhobie. Sometimes he considerately 
leaves you a small fragment to remind you of the 
pattern. Sometimes he leaves a goodly hole to 
show where the button once was, for the place 
thereof shall know it no more. Sometimes he even 
fetches the broken bits of button in proof that he 
has not stolen and sold it. } 

He has other means, too, of reminding you that 
your clothes have been at his slender mercies. He 
uses a large heavy iron filled with charcoal, as 
you can frequently tell by the small round holes 
burnt in the fabric. You may also find bright red 
stains from the betel-nut (the Indian equivalent for 
chewing gum) that he was munching as he worked. 
And at the time of the Holi—a most unholy festi- 
val—you may get your washing adorned with 
streaks of yellow and red and blue and green from 
the liquid powder that the merrymakers squirt at 
each other. 

But the dhobie is such a gentleman that it is ex- 


30 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


tremely difficult to reprimand him. You may cut 
his pay or threaten to get another dhobie, but he 
bears all recriminations with such an air of tolerant 
nobility as to leave the uncomfortable impression 
that buttons and rents and such-like trifles are en- 
tirely beneath his.dignity even to discuss. 

One year when plague was raging in our town 
we allowed the dhobie to occupy a small house in 
our compound, which was well away from the af- 
fected area. As he would otherwise have left the 
town temporarily, and thus inconvenienced us, he 
considered the favour all on our side, and such a 
mundane thing as house-rent was not even men- 
tioned. One day on opening out a beautifully 
folded damask linen tablecloth, I discovered to my 
horror that it had been eaten through and through 
by rats. (Now perhaps you think that a poor mis- 
sionary has no business having double damask linen 
tablecloths and that she therefore deserved their 
despoiling. But if she had got them as a wedding 
present from an aunt in Ireland, you wouldn’t ob- 
ject to her using them, would you? And you 
would be entirely satisfied to know that she would 
probably never get any more, as the Irish aunt is, 
unfortunately, deceased!) Well, I sent for the 
dhobte and gave emphatic views on the crime and 
my own loss. He stood politely attentive and then 
assured me of his deep sorrow. But he informed 
me that when the rats had gnawed and ruined my 
tablecloth they had also gnawed and ruined his lit- 


“AHI V DONO “ENNOUY SAT Wokd “AWOD AIdOgG HOIHM OL AVVZVG FDVITIA V 













-) 
we. *, 





Le, “ 

Aes 

ats 
. 7 


MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING dl 


tle boy’s cap—which was a greater loss to him, he 
being a poor man, than the tablecloth was to me. 
As it had happened in our compound and in a 
house we had given him, he was by no means re- 
sponsible for the damage to my property. On the 
other hand, we were entirely responsible for his 
loss of a cap, and would I kindly give him a rupee 
immediately to buy a new one! 

But one learns to put less and less value on the 
things which belong to this material world and 
which dhobies may rend in their enthusiasm; so 
you may keep all the electric washers and ironers 
that have taken the blueness out of blue Monday, 
but leave me my smiling brown rascal to do the 
family laundry for a few rupees a month. 


We were sitting at our lonely breakfast in our 
lonely bungalow at the back of nowhere and miles 
from any other white person. The air was warm 
and still, ‘Through the open door and windows we 
could catch a refreshing glimpse of green trees and 
bushes and a few gaudy flowers in the garden. In 
the thick pink antigonum covering the arches of the 
verandah there hovered a perky little gray and black 
bulbul, who would balance himself on a swinging 
branch of the vine and sway backwards and for- 
wards, cocking his intelligent black eye at us to see 
if we were admiring him, and breaking out now 
and again into a twitter of optimism. 

And round the table hovered Jummal, our 


32 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


equally perky little Mohammedan butler, cocking 
his unintelligent black eye at us to see if we re- 
quired anything. With his baggy white trousers 
and white coat, his hollow chest and round shoul- 
ders, his protruding chin, solemn brown face and 
enormous white turban, Jummal was an awe-in- 
spiring sight. He might look expressionless but 
his mind was alert. He knew a few words of 
English which he vented as often as possible with 
inordinate pride, and he was eager to learn more. 
By putting two and two together Jummal could, 
like many other folks, reach amazing conclusions. 

On this particular morning his wooden face all 
of a sudden relaxed into a look of profound sagac- 
ity, and he dashed from the room with a haste that 
made us gasp. He soon returned with a large 
bottle of honey from the pantry. He placed it 
triumphantly on the table in front of his master, 
withdrew to a respectful distance, and waited mo- 
tionless but with an air of conscious virtue. 

The head of the house and I looked at each other 
in amazement. 

“Why, Jummal,” said I, “ what is this? ” 

“ Honey, memsahib.”’ 

“ Yes, but why have you brought it?” 

“Sahib asking for honey, memsahib.” 

The sahib strenuously denied any such thing, but 
Jummal, looking distressed but obstinate, insisted, 
“ Please yes, memsahib, I say true. Sahib saying 
“ honey,),’ 


MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING 33 


Then it suddenly dawned on us. You see, we 
hadn’t been married very long, and in the course 
of conversation there had slipped out a term of 
address—shall I call it?—occasionally used by 
American husbands! 

Poor Jummal! He was a picture of wounded 
dignity as we laughed and chuckled and laughed 
again, but he felt better when we recovered suffi- 
cient presence of mind to explain that sahib had 
been referring to another kind of honey! 

Jummal might have been with us for many a 
year, but during our vacation he got the offer of 
a magnificent job, magnificent not because of its 
princely salary of six dollars a month but because 
it involved only “ sitting work.” It is one of the 
ambitions of the East to sit while it works and still 
draw pay, and now Jummal is caretaker of a large 
empty bungalow where he has nothing to do but 
sit and smoke and eat and drink, and see that other 
folks do their work. What more could any one 
desire? 

It was difficult to get any sort of a house-boy in 
that forlorn out-station, so Jummal had several un- 
satisfactory successors. I particularly remember 
Das, the big, curly-haired wretch with two thumbs 
on his right hand, two thumbs which used to ap- 
pear so perilously near my agitated soup as he laid 
the plate before me that the soup forever lost its 
attraction. I could not help surmising that there 
might have been even greater propinquity before 


34 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


it reached the table. Now, one thumb in the soup 
is bad enough and may sometimes be inevitable, but 
two thumbs. Wn en INo: 

The hamal is a male housemaid who, in modest 
missionary establishments, is usually one and the 
same person as the-butler. He will sweep out your 
rooms with a fan-shaped bunch of dried straws and 
will succeed admirably in elevating the dust from 
the carpet on to the chairs and other furniture, on 
to your clothes and on to any food that he happens 
to have left within reach. Then, what little dirt 
has escaped being deposited elsewhere he will draw 
into a corner, lift with his hands on to his brush 
held in a horizontal position, and then convey out 
to the garden or the rubbish pile, whichever hap- 
pens to be the more convenient. : 

The hamal thinks it fussy to dust under instead 
of round, and to clean what would never be seen 
if you didn’t poke into things. He would much 
prefer to do the dusting first, and, until trained into 
your queer foreign ways, would be quite likely to 
help himself to one of your best dish-towels or 
even a linen napkin to do it. To him all cloth is 
simply cloth, with no fine distinctions of damask 
and linen and cotton. A good layer of dish-towels 
has been known to serve as a raincoat on a wet 
night for an Indian house-boy making a dive from 
the bungalow to his little house at the back; and 
dusters with a large black or red check make ex- 
cellent turbans. 


MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING 35 


The hamal’s favourite job is cleaning knives, this 
being “sitting work.” He will while away many 
pleasant hours squatting on the floor of the back 
verandah, gossiping with the other servants, talking 
philosophy, or merely dreaming day-dreams, while 
he polishes your steel knives to within an inch of 
their lives—and their handles. The aforemen- 
tioned Jummal tried his hand on my best silver- 
plated knives, and after spoiling four of them he 
came to ask me why they wouldn’t sharpen! 

No, an Indian boy’s ideas of efficiency and hon- 
esty and cleanliness hardly coincide with those of 
his white master. But to be able to live happily 
in the East one simply must learn the gentle art of 
letting things pass. Even the honest man expects 
to make his little commissions on all his purchases 
in the bazaar, and if you do him out of what he 
considers his legitimate and time-honoured right 
then he will take it out of you in some other way. 
The over-stingy mistress is the one who most fre- 
quently gets stung. Now I will admit that it is 
hard (at first!) to be vaguely aware that small 
leakages are going on and yet not make every ef- 
fort to detect and stop them. The whole secret 
lies in learning to distinguish between honest and 
dishonest stealing! If you go against what is the 
custom of the country then you are banging your 
head against a stone wall and hurting yourself in- 
stead of the wall. Many a missionary, harassed 
with the constant problem of making impossible 


36 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


ends meet, has worn herself and her family to a 
frazzle trying to cheat her servants out of their 
due perquisites—for that is how they look on it. 
She is the dishonest one, not they! ? 

A missionary sahib whose cook was using too 
much firewood began to chop it himself each day 
and counted out a certain number of pieces. He 
succeeded in saving about two cents a day at the 
expenditure of an hour of precious missionary time, 
untold ounces of still more precious energy, and a 
fatal loss of prestige among his Indian friends. 

A new memsahib, horrified at the thought of a 
self-sacrificing missionary of the Gospel indulging 
in the luxury of a cook, dispensed with one, did the 
cooking herself, and thus induced a nervous break- 
down which necessitated her return to America. It 
hardly pays, you see. 

It is horrid extravagance for us missionaries to 
get promoted to a hospital or a tombstone too early 
in the fight, so we learn to swallow with equanimity 
much that would make us balk at home in America, 
and we are profoundly thankful for our boys, with 
all their faults and failings. 

Sometimes, at night, I glance across to the row 
of one-roomed houses that lie fifty yards or so back 
of the bungalow. I see little fires glowing, fires 
made of twigs and fuel-cakes and a few pieces of 
wood (quite probably my wood) where our boys 
are cooking their modest evening repast of flat 
meal bread and highly seasoned vegetables. I hear 


MISSIONARY HOUSEKEEPING 37 


them laugh as they sit round gossiping and chafhing 
each other. Especially do I notice our beloved 
Krishna’s chuckle, for he is the funny man of the 
party. Now and again a familiar figure is silhou- 
etted against the glow of the little fires. And a 
wave of amusement and gratitude rushes over me 
at the thought of our amazing good luck in having 
such a jolly and loyal bunch to help us, and I 
mentally throw up my hat with “ Hooray for our 
Indian boys—bless ’em!” 


Ill 


FRIENDS AND FOES OF THE ANIMAL 
KINGDOM 


wi AHIB, sahib! Quick, sahib! A snake in 

GS the drain! ” 

White under his brown skin, panting 
and puffing, the man stood trembling on our ve- 
randah. Fortunately the sahib happened to be in 
the bungalow, and seizing a stout iron pole he ran 
out to where an excited crowd had gathered both 
outside and inside the one-roomed house of an 
ancient Bible-woman, everybody shouting and try- 
ing to talk at once. 

Now, each of those little houses has a low stone 
coping built round a square in the corner, where 
the people do their bathing and wash their pots 
and pans; where a drain leads through the wall to 
a runnel at the back. It transpired that the old 
lady had poured some water down her drain and 
had found it blocked—evidently by a snake, for she 
had heard a hissing noise. Bill poked his pole 
down and heard a distinct hiss; so he told the 
people to pour in copious water while he ran round 
to the mouth of the drain and waited. In.a few 
minutes a snake emerged, fuming and fussing, his 

38 


FRIENDS AND FOES 39 


hood spread out in anger a few inches below his 
head—a sure sign that this was a cobra, one of 
the deadliest snakes in India. Bill broke the rep- 
tile’s back with one fell blow, but the loathsome 
creature continued to writhe in impotent fury until 
despatched properly. He measured over four feet, 
and his dried skin made a useful adjunct in fur- 
lough days and made many a bright-eyed white boy 
vow ardently (and, alas, temporarily!) to be a 
missionary. 

In our flat, bare Deccan, snakes are not very 
common. It is in the jungle districts that one 
must keep one’s eyes skinned; yet we saw quite 
enough of them for our comfort. I love India 
and nearly everything Indian, but I do not include 
snakes, except, perhaps, the fangless ones in the 
snake-charmer’s basket. We often saw green 
grass-snakes. One night we heard a terrific 
screeching, and on running out with a lantern dis- 
covered a snake swallowing a toad holus-bolus. 
We killed the snake and rescued the toad, but I 
doubt whether he found life worth living after 
that experience. Another night we heard a similar 
noise and failed to locate it; in the morning we 
found a dead snake with the body of a toad show- 
ing through his stretched skin. Some animal had 
evidently killed him while he was handicapped by 
his over-full and undigested meal. 

We, ourselves, had several narrow escapes—two 
of them dangerously so. One rainy night we had 


40 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


climbed the wet, slippery steps to the roof, and 
hurried along the shaky wooden balcony at the end 
of the bungalow. I had been more hilarious than 
usual over Bill’s outfit. With a greenish-black 
overcoat that had seen years of service at home 
and was now bursting at the seams, with striped 
pyjamas turned up to the knee, with an ancient 
pair of rubbers above his old dress slippers, with a 
Dietz lantern in one hand and in the other a dilapi- 
dated parasol which had once been a gaudy blue 
but was now a nondescript and well-ventilated 
gray, the Rev. William Wilberforce looked more 
like the comic figure in a pseudo-Eastern opera 
than an ordained missionary of the Gospel. My 
own get-up was equally ludicrous, but I shall mod- 
estly refrain from describing it. 

Well, we had just reached the upper verandah 
and were about to make a dash for the covered-in 
porch where the beds had been drawn because of 
the rain, when I caught sight of a dark object on 
the ground. I seized the lantern, held it close, and 
discovered a snake coiled up on the very spot where 
my bed usually stood in fair weather. My hilarity 
instantly evaporated and other sensations took its 
place. Bill proceeded to business. We had neither 
stick nor weapon of any kind, and the fragile para- 
sol would be literally a broken reed to lean upon for 
a life-and-death stunt. But by the greatest good 
luck some workmen had been up on the roof that 
day and, Indian fashion, had left a broken rafter 


FRIENDS AND FOES 41 


lying round. Bill seized this and pinned the 
quiescent snake behind his head. He grew lively 
then, but I held him down with the board while 
Bill stood on his head and squelched him. It was 
a creepy feeling, that of realizing that one step 
farther might have meant a horrible death. Below, 
the watchman appeared tardily and when we threw 
the snake down to him he pronounced it to be a 
poisonous one. We meant to verify this the next 
day but never got the opportunity; for he was 
eaten up by birds in the early morning. 

A still more thrilling escape came later on. Biull 
had been called for in haste to settle some local 
trouble in one of our villages, and I had not meant 
to accompany him. But almost at the last mo- 
ment, when the packing was practically done, I 
felt an inexplicable but quite irresistible impulse to 
go too. 

We camped out at a Travellers’ Bungalow in 
very bad repair, and while we were sitting at a 
scratch dinner one evening the rain came on and 
was soon pouring down through the leaky roof. 
When Bill got up to change our baggage over to 
the dry spots in the room, a new stream began to 
drip down on my neck, so I changed round to the 
chair in which he had been sitting. But now the 
water began to drop on and into our food, so we 
lifted the whole table and set it down in the 
one dry corner available. I was just about to sit 
down to dinner for the third time when I noticed 


42 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


what seemed to be a shadow on the back of my 
chair. A closer inspection revealed a snake, its 
long, lithe body coiled round and round one of the 
wooden bars. Its head must have been within an 
inch, first of Bill’s back and then of mine, and 
close to Bill’s hand when he carried the chair over 
to its new position. I felt as cool as an ice-box 
while I called to Bill to come over and see the 
snake on my chair, and while it was being des- 
patched with a hammer; but I was rather shaky 
after it was all over and we realized what a close 
call we had both had. When we told our friends 
in Barispoor about it, our old Bible-woman ex- 
claimed, “Ah, mudumsahib, that explains why you 
suddenly felt you had to go. ‘The good Lord knew 
that the sahib would need four eyes instead of 
two!” 

Snakes are the most dangerous, but by no means 
the only objectionable specimens to be met in our 
part of India. Scorpions are a good second— 
mean, low-down beetle-like creatures that hide in 
dark corners or just a few inches beneath the sur- 
face of the ground, and are ready to shoot out 
their horned tail and sting any foot or hand that 
encroaches on their domain. Their sting is poison- 
ous and extremely painful, though not often fatal 
except in the case of young children. Our poor 
Indian friends, sleeping on the mud floors of their 
dark little houses, were frequent victims, and we 
began to look on scorpions as a repulsive but effec- 


FRIENDS AND FOES 43 


tive mission agency, for people began to come to 
us for “scorpion medicine-water,’ and while we 
applied ammonia outside and inside, we often had 
the opportunity of telling them informally about 
our religion and our reason for coming to India. 
Our help in the matter of scorpion bites did a good 
deal to make the non-Christians friendly towards 
us and made us realize the inestimable good we 
could do with even a small dispensary. Caste peo- 
ple cannot take water from any person of a lower 
caste or of no caste—such as the missionary! But 
they have a dispensation that allows them to take 
* medicine-water.”’ Even then, some caste people 
would hesitate about drinking any liquid we of- 
fered them. One day a young woman of good 
caste was brought to us in great agony resulting 
from a scorpion sting. When I brought her a cup 
of ammonia and water she refused it and asked 
for something to put on the wound—nothing to 
take internally. I assured her it was “ medicine- 
water ” but she was adamant. And then our little 
Mohammedan butler stepped out and pitched into 
her for being such a fool. “Don’t you know,” 
he demanded, “ that the medicine-water cost three 
rupees a bottle? And here mudumsahib is offering 
it to you for nothing? Who ever heard of such 
a fool as to refuse three-rupees-a-bottle medicine- 
water? And you screaming with pain? Go on 
and drink it, you silly!” And whether it was the 
effect of the scolding or of my persuasions or of a 


AA OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


new twinge of pain I cannot tell, but she made a 
grimace and drank up the stuff. 

But we had scorpions in the bungalow too; and 
as the paint on the doors and windows was ex- 
actly their shade of brown we had one side of the 
house painted white for greater safety. More than 
once a scorpion has fallen on my hand when I 
was closing a door, but in each case was so taken 
aback by his fall that he had not presence of mind 
to exercise his stinging privileges before I shook 
him off. Once I all but touched a horrid, big fel- 
low curled up in my linen press, and another time 
in the bottom of an otherwise empty bowl which 
I took from a high shelf. And one day I found 
one in the folds of a white embroidered dress I 
was just about to put on. I threw the dress on 
the floor, stamped the brute to pulp, and then hol- 
lered to Bill to come and see the corpse in its white 
embroidered winding-sheet! I only once got ac- 
tually stung (by a scorpion, I mean!)—when I put 
my hand on my hip and disturbed one that had 
evidently fallen from the roof of the tent we had 
just been putting up. He was not very big but he 
got me in the fleshy part between thumb and fore- 
finger. ‘The whole hand swelled up and was pain- 
ful for hours, and I realized for the first time the 
full significance of Rehoboam’s threat—“ My fa- 
ther chastised you with whips, but I will chastise 
you with scorpions! ” 

Lesser pests we had, of course, the smaller an- 


FRIENDS AND FOES 45 


noyances that cause discomfort rather than harm. 
Sand-flies, mosquitoes, bugs, red ants that nip with 
their pincers, white ants that eat through cloth and 
wood and mud and cardboard and reduce any 
perishable possessions to fragments—these we had 
and more, but the less said about them the better. 

Of wild animals we saw little, for the Deccan is 
too open to shelter the larger and fiercer kinds. 
We have heard hyenas and seen wolves, and three 
days in succession a wildcat ran past our break- 
fast table with one of our chickens in his mouth. 
We often saw lovely big herds of hill-antelope 
grazing on the rolling plains of the district. It 
seemed a shame to bag such graceful creatures, but 
they do immense havoc to standing crops and the 
farmers often begged us to shoot them. Besides, 
they were a welcome addition to the larder in a 
region where no stores were to be had, so 
several trophies on our floors and walls bear wit- 
ness to Bill’s prowess. 

Of domestic animals by far the most important 
is the bullock, who is really our old friend in the 
pages of our childish picture-books—the zebu with 
his imposing dewlap. He, rather than the horse, 
is the friend of man in India. He draws the 
plough—very often a primitive affair such as Abra- 
ham must have used on the plains of Mamre. 
Alone or in pairs he draws heavy carts with the 
most varied loads—it may be bales of raw cotton 
for the mills, or huge piles of grain-stalks for fod- 


46 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


der, or a laughing, gesticulating bunch of a dozen 
women and children off for a fair or festival. He 
drags the stone rollers when the road is being re- 
paired. He draws water from the well by ambling 
down a slope and thus elevating a big leather bag 
full of water. Blindfolded, he plods round in a 
circle, pulling the huge pestle which grinds the oil 
out of the peanuts in a huge mortar. Patient, 
phlegmatic, resigned, he will saunter along the 
country roads, unguided by rope or whip, while 
his master lies blissfully asleep in the bottom of 
the cart. 

The water-buffalo is about the ugliest and most 
ungainly animal in creation, heavy and unwieldy, 
slouching through life as though apologetic for its 
unlovely existence. Here is the best possible de- 
scription of it, as it struck Sir Frederick Treves 
on his journey round the world: “A blue bare 
beast who may once have had both intelligence and 
hair, but who, on the loss of both, remained a 
dejected embodiment of the ugliness of stupidity 
and of the beastliness of life.’ An unkind legend 
also relates that when Adam had created all the 
necessary animals, Eve was allowed to try her un- 
practised hand—and the hideous buffalo was the 
result! But if the buffalo cannot be beautiful it is 
eminently useful. The male buffalo does every 
piece of work that the bullock does, and is often 
yoked with him for draught purposes, while his 
consort is a marvellous milk factory, producing 


FRIENDS AND FOES 47 


quarts and quarts of milk containing over eleven 
per cent. butter-fat. 

The water-buffalo is entirely distinct from the 
American buffalo that figures in the Wild West, 
but is sometimes confused with it, A friend of 
ours had sent a cheque for a wedding present and 
when we told her we had bought a buffalo with 
the money, she wrote back in amazement and asked 
if we were setting up a menagerie! It is well 
named the water-buffalo. You cannot understand 
the meaning of the verb “ wallow ” until or unless 
you have seen a herd of these “ blue, bare beasts ” 
wallowing in a pool of water and mud, with just 
the tips of their horns and their noses in sight. 
You especially appreciate it if you happen to be 
hot and tired, yet prevented by unreasonable con- 
vention from following their example. 

A rich merchant in Barispoor possessed three 
dromedaries. We used to watch them swing ma- 
jestically along the road in front of the bungalow 
—nonchalant, superior, imperturbable. But one 
day one of them was perturbed, and so was I! 1 
met him as I was cycling home. His driver had 
left him to stalk on alone, and he had strolled over 
to the wrong side of the road. He was startled 
by the figure of a white woman on wheels directly 
in front of him, so he balked. To avoid him I 
made a wide sweep to my right, and simultane- 
ously he did the same to his left, with the result 
that we all but collided; and I scooted along just 


48 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


a few inches below his enquiring nose, to his con- 
sternation, my own alarm, and the amusement of 
a crowd of pedestrians. 

Our own immediate family had the merit of at 
least sounding distinguished. Being cut off from 
social amenities we_determined to bestow classy 
names on the members of our household and com- 
pound, and so make believe that we hobnobbed 
with famous personages. The bullock was there- 
fore named “ Cesar,” this being a dynastic name, 
so to speak, applicable to any bullock we happened 
to have at the time. ‘The first Czesar, unlike his 
illustrious ancestor, developed a weak-kneed policy 
and would occasionally kneel down on the road and 
remain in this pious but useless attitude for an 
indefinite time. As only part of his purchase price 
had been paid, we exchanged him for a more nor- 
mal specimen. Other Cesars followed, all of them 
exceedingly useful in drawing our cart when it 
went to market, or to bring drinking water from 
the sweet well a mile away, or when it went on an 
evangelistic tour in the villages. 

The water-buffalo, stately and dignified, was 
dubbed ‘“ Cleopatra” and her little son “ Mark 
Antony.” The relationship was not historically 
correct, but the juxtaposition of the names sounded 
familiar. 

We also had a small pet deer of whom Bill was 
inordinately fond, and of whom our puppy was 
inordinately jealous. Fortunately, perhaps, for our 


‘IVY waLLAg 
INT) Wd NAAAIY SNIVINOD MII AIH GNV SAMOLOVA-NTIJY SNOTIAAUVJ V SI Olvddnd-YTLVA\ FH] 








FRIENDS AND FOES 49 


domestic felicity, the little pet succumbed to some 
infantile ailment and was buried under the lone 
pomegranate bush. 

And last but not least comes our adorable puppy 
‘“ Pharaoh,” a nondescript white and brown quad- 
ruped, probably nine-tenths terrier and one-tenth 
just unlabelled “ dog,” with a stumpy brown tail 
curled tight over on itself like a little pig’s. The 
fuzzy-wuzzy hair on his ears soon made his name 
degenerate into “ Fuzzle,’’ much to the amazement 
of our Mohammedan friends, who informed us that 
“Fuzl” meant “ graceful.” But Fuzzle he will 
remain to the end of the chapter, and the end 1s 
not yet; for Fuzzle, toothless but spry, continues 
to bless us, and has fits of activity in which he puts 
up a good bluff that he is still an irresponsible 
puppy. 

Out there in Barispoor he was my guide and 
comfort in many a hard place, and a lonely life 
would have been still lonelier without his canine 
companionship. And if ever an animal had human 
traits, that animal was Fuzzle. I learned a great 
deal of interesting psychology through my little 
four-footed friend. Once he was stung badly by 
a scorpion when we were far from home and from 
ammonia. He held up his paw and moaned, and 
looked at me with reproachful eyes. He bit me 
when I tried to sympathize with him, but finally 
quieted down and lay on an old waterproof. We 
found afterwards that he had chewed it through 


50 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


in his agony. When we got him home we found 
he was paralyzed. Ammonia did little good, for 
the poison was all through his system. During the 
night I discovered that he was stiffened and al- 
most cold. In defiance of all rules of hygiene I 
took him into bed and kept him warm. Next 
morning he was alive but unable to move, and I 
hated to see Bill go off to a village for the day, 
for I felt sure Fuzzle would be dead before he got 
back. In the evening I set off for church and bade 
my doggie a rather mournful farewell, for it 
seemed heartless to leave him lying helpless. 

Just at that moment Bill came back and gave 
his usual halloo. 

I met him on the verandah and told him in lugu- 
brious fashion how far through Fuzzle was, and 
how hopeless it seemed. And then! . . . we 
heard a noise, and if Fuzzle himself didn’t appear 
—shaky and weak and wobbly, but with his stumpy 
tail wagging to beat the band as he jumped up on 
Bill and gave him his usual fervid greeting. It 
must have been ‘“‘ His Master’s Voice’”’ that did 
the trick and supplied the necessary stimulus. And 
once up and walking, Fuzzle simply did not have 
the effrontery to lie down and malinger again. 
With a sly and yet shamefaced glance round at 
me now and again he cheerfully trotted in front 
of me to church, to the astonishment of our Chris- 
tians who had seen him lying evidently on the point 
of death ten minutes before. 


IV 


THE DAILY ROUND, THE UNCOMMON 
TASK 


NE, scorching day away back a generation 
() ago, a tall, muscular man named Ramji 
was trudging wearily along the dusty 
road. The little pack on his head contained only 
a couple of flat breads and a change of clothes, 
but it seemed to get heavier at every step, for he 
had tramped forty-two miles from home. He 
sighed with relief when a bend in the road showed 
him a long, straggling town stretched out in front 
of him, for it was the headquarters of the district 
and his immediate goal, he having been summoned 
in by the Collector to discuss the matter of a field. 
Ramji stopped at a little pool by the wayside, 
scooped up the water and gulped it down ecstatic- 
ally, and then bathed hands and face and feet and 
changed his clothes. He asked some passers-by 
where the Collector sahib lived, and was directed 
to a large white bungalow. He squatted on the 
verandah and asked a servant if he might see the 
sahib. Out came a white man with a friendly face. 
“Salaam, Maharaj,” said Ramji, bowing low 
at his feet. “I have come in answer to your sum- 
mons.” 


* What summons? ” 
51 


52 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


Ramji explained, and the white man smiled. “I 
see,’ he said, “ you have mistaken the bungalow. 
The Collector lives over there,’ and he indicated a 
big, walled-in enclosure. “I’m a missionary, come 
to tell you people about a God of love and a re- 
ligion of brotherhood.”” And Ramji listened open- 
mouthed to strange ideas that were absolutely revo- 
lutionary to him. Then the missionary-sahib gave 
him a few little books to read later on, and sent a 
servant to direct him safely to the Collector’s 
bungalow. 

When Ramji had finished his business with the 
Government and was on his way home to his vil- 
lage six miles from Barispoor, he pondered con- 
tinually on his recent experiences, and especially 
on the white sahib who had treated him—a de- 
spised outcaste—with as much courtesy and con- 
sideration as if he had been a twice-born Brahman 
or another white man. Later on he read his little 
books, especially one entitled The True Way, and 
he found that the missionary had simply been obey- 
ing the commands of an unseen Master and God 
who looked on high and low alike as His children. 
And he was convinced that he had found the medi- 
cine that would turn badness to goodness and keep 
a man good. 

And some years later a happy day came when 
Ramji and his wife and their children were bap- 
tised by the white sahib and became the first fol- 
lowers of Christ in all that vast region. 


THE DAILY ROUND 53 


But in the meantime it so happened that about 
fifty miles from Ramji’s home there lived a no- 
torious gang of Mangs who had pillaged and mur- 
dered their neighbours for years with impunity, 
and had always managed to elude the half-hearted 
vigilance of the police. But one day Mesoba, their 
leader, was trapped and sentenced to three years’ 
imprisonment by the Judge of the District—who 
happened to be Meadows Taylor, the famous In- 
dian historian. During his confinement, Mesoba 
learned to read—an unusual accomplishment for 
an outcaste in those days. 

On his way home, after serving his time, Me- 
soba stopped off at his friend Ramji’s village, and 
learned to his amazement of the divine elixir that 
could transmute a criminal into a virtuous man. 
He was evidently somewhat subdued by his prison 
experience, for he wondered rather pathetically 
whether this medicine would be potent to change 
his own life. He asked the loan of The True Way, 
and studied it deeply. His old accomplices who 
had been fully expecting—perhaps hoping—that he 
would immediately embark on a new career of 
crime, were astounded at his mildness, forbear- 
ance and piety. What is more, they, in their turn, 
“got religion,’ and they got it so badly that the 
village which had been the scourge of the neigh- 
bourhood became a centre of Christian influence. 
Those who had terrorized both friends and foes 
now invited them to join each evening in the group 


54 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


that listened to Mesoba reading The True Way, 
for as yet neither Bible nor hymn-book had been 
seen. 

Some years later, a missionary stumbled on to 
this group of self-made Christians. The trans- 
formed Mesoba became the pastor and an ardent 
evangelist, and he died full of years and honour. 
The light that he kindled in his disreputable vil- 
lage spread through the district, so that now, fifty 
years later, there is a respectable and self-respect- 
ing Christian community of Mangs—our parish- 
ioners and friends! | 

Barispoor, itself, is in British Territory, but the 
surrounding district is almost entirely in a Native 
State. We were actually in a tract of twenty thou- 
sand square miles with a population of two and a 
half million, where we were the only white people, 
where there was not one qualified doctor or one 
organized hospital, and where, when the gaunt 
figures of Famine and Disease stalked through the 
land, the people simply lay down and turned their 
faces to the wall and expected to die. 

From this huge stretch of untouched territory 
we cut off a tract of about sixty miles up the Light 
Railway line—in fact, to its terminus, and about 
ten miles on either side of it. This included the 
cluster of villages where, thanks to the life and © 
work of Ramji and Mesoba, there were four hun- 
dred Christians, and we considered this our imme- 
diate parish. But even in this comparatively tiny 


THE DAILY ROUND 55 


section of twelve hundred square miles we felt our 
efforts ridiculously puny and insignificant. It was 
like baling out a leaky ocean liner with a teaspoon! 

One of the hardest things in a hard situation 
was the want of medical knowledge. Wherever 
we went, crowds would gather immediately—the 
blind, the lame, the sick, just as they gathered two 
thousand years ago round the Great Healer. The 
mere fact that a white man and woman had visited 
their village raised false hopes that every ill would 
be cured. Nothing hurt or depressed us more than 
the sight of afflicted ones who tottered towards us 
with just a glimmer of hope on their unhappy 
faces and who went away again unhelped. We 
often wondered rebelliously what was the use of 
Bill’s elaborate training in theology if he had to 
spend his life among poor sufferers who needed 
their bodies cured before they could be interested 
in their souls’ welfare? It seemed preposterous to 
try and teach a new religion to people whose bodies 
were racked with pain. Yet we got miraculous 
“cures” by means of quinine, cough mixture, and 
a few simple salves and ointments; and we deter- 
mined to devote part of our furlough to the ac- 
quisition of a little more knowledge. 


And now let us go off for a tour of our outlying 
parish. Our equipment is simple—a couple of 
tents, cots, tables, and chairs; a basket of cooking 
vessels and camp dishes; a trunk of stores; our 


56 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


beloved Krishna, our cook and friend; a handy 
man to help with the tent and the animals; and 
lastly, our puppy and our victrola. ‘These last two 
are extremely valuable mission agents. Fuzzle will 
rush out of the tent and greet any chance passer- 
by. At first his overtures may be misunderstood, 
for the average Indian knows no dog but the fierce 
pariah variety used to protect the villages; but 
Fuzzle will wag his tail and positively invite the 
stranger to come and have a talk with the sahib. 
And Fuzzle’s art of begging by sitting upright and 
waggling his forepaws is a tremendous draw, and 
makes rows of bright-faced urchins SMa Ic hug 
themselves. 

The victrola is a novelty, and wherever its 
strains are heard we can be sure of a miscellaneous 
crowd; for even in a seemingly empty horizon in 
India, and at any hour of the day or night, one 
can always get a crowd from nowhere if one makes 
an enticing noise. 

We take the help of the railway as far as pos- 
sible and then set out on our cycles for some shady 
spot under a spreading banyan or mango tree where 
our tents are already pitched. This we make a 
centre for visiting round in the near-by villages, 
and sometimes our days are full though we do not 
move from our camping-ground. As soon as day 
breaks our visitors begin, and there is seldom a 
minute throughout the day when we are left in 
peace. Some folks are merely curious and come 


THE DAILY ROUND 57 


to stare, others come to be friendly, but the great 
majority want help of some kind or another. 


Here, for instance, comes a big, hurly man trem- 
bling with fear. He is a Christian, a night-watch- 
man in the nearest village, and we have known 
him for years to be an honest man. But a rich 
merchant has had his house broken into and has 
lost boxes of jewellery and silk garments and cash. 
Shunker is at once suspected, partly because he is 
the watchman, partly because he is a Christian, 
and partly because it is the custom of the corrupt 
police system to seize somebody quickly in order to 
show that they are on their job. Shunker had 
protested his innocence, so they tried to bring him 
to reason by torture. He shows his swollen finger- 
joints which had been bent back until they cracked ; 
and he knows that worse is in store for him. Bill, 
of course, decides to deal with the said police, but 
he has no weapon but moral force, for in this 
Native State justice is all mixed up with bribery 
and “ palm-oiling.”’ We may threaten to go to 
headquarters and lodge a complaint, but everybody 
knows that it will take months to get a hearing; 
and it is surprising how many false witnesses can 
be trumped up in one day, to say nothing of sev- 
eral months. As a matter of fact, Bill’s moral 
force usually works, for he has carried some 
shameful cases of injustice right through the 
courts, has been instrumental in getting more than 


58 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


one corrupt and cruel police officer transferred, and 
has been the means of restoring much property 
wrongly appropriated. Shunker, therefore, loses 
his terrified expression and brightens up when Bill 
promises to go over to the village with him in the 
afternoon. : 

Now here sits a Hindu man, waiting his turn. 
He claims our protection because his uncle is a 
Christian. He too had been tortured by the po- 
lice—hung up on a tree by his thumbs! He prom- 
ises that if the sahib will get justice for him he, 
himself, and at least three relatives will be bap- 
tised. Bill explains that we don’t want baptisms 
with a motive, but that in the cause of right he 
will look into his case. 

Here comes a Hindu woman, vocal from afar, 
wailing and beating her breast. She falls at our 
feet and embraces and kisses our shoes and de- 
mands her child. It transpires that she is the con- 
cubine of a ne’er-do-well Christian who, in a fit of 
temper, had carried off the baby. The said pater- 
familias now appears, accompanied by his little 
Christian wife and her baby, and we feel quite a 
la Solomon when we are confronted by the two 
weeping women and the yelling babies. The man 
is a stubborn, ‘sullen fellow who declares that if 
he can’t keep both “wives” he will turn Hindu 
and marry as many wives as he likes—at which 
the little Christian wife breaks into terrified 
screaming and grovels at his feet. We talk for a 


THE DAILY ROUND 59 


long time and seem to get nowhere, so we defer 
judgment—a plan that often works wonders. And 
in this case it certainly did. In a short while the 
man came back, smiling and pleased with himself, 
to say that he was going to turn over a new leaf 
and be good to his “ married” wife. 

“But what provision will you make for the 
‘other’ wife?” 

“Oh, that’s easy. I’ll see that she marries a 
Hindu widower!” 

And so everything is settled to everybody’s sat- 
isfaction, and we don’t feel as if we had had much 
part in the solution. We simply have to console 
ourselves by remembering that we are in India! 

Here again is a Hindu farmer, a Maratha. He 
says a valuable field was taken away from him by 
fraud. He has made a case of it, and it is to 
come up shortly at the headquarters of the district. 
He wants Bill to write a letter in his favour! Bull 
explains that he can’t possibly do that until he 
hears both sides of the case, so the man goes off 
to fetch some unbiassed (!) witnesses. (I shall 
anticipate events by mentioning that Bill was con- 
vinced of the man’s honesty and went twice to the 
courts to help him, with the result that his field 
was restored to him, and the whole countryside 
went wild with excitement because this white mis- 
sionary was evidently going to help the oppressed 
and deliver them from the hand of the oppressor. ) 

A ragged woman with six emaciated children 


60 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


has been sitting on the edge of the crowd and she 
now comes forward with her tale of woe. She is 
the Leah in the family, and she and her children 
are actually starving in these hard times, while the 
Rachel and her children are well fed. She wants 
help to go to her brother in a town many miles 
away, where she will get work in the mills and be 
able to support her children. We promise to try 
and bring the obstreperous husband to task, and if 
he fails to play up, will help her to find work. This 
means incidentally that we shall have to pay rail- 
way fares and clothing—but it’s all in the day’s 
work! 


By far the favourite hour of the day, both for 
us and for the people we have come to visit, is 
from eight till nine in the evenings, or rather, from 
eight o’clock as far into the night as we can keep 
our eyes open. It is the only time when the peo- 
ple are supposed to be free; for the cold weather 
—the only time for camping out—happens to be 
their busy season, with cotton-picking, peanut- 
gathering, the flax harvest, and the winter plough- 
ing. We have a welcome in both the caste and 
the outcaste quarters of the village, though natu- 
rally we spend most of our time with the Chris- 
tians. We sit out in the open on a string cot cov- 
ered by a dirty (and usually lively) blanket which 
some one has been kind enough to fetch out for 
us. We must not offend by refusing his hospi- 


THE DAILY ROUND 61 


tality. On cold nights a fire will be lit, and its 
flicker will light up the faces of the rows and rows 
of Indians squatted round it. Pariah dogs will 
prowl round the company and sometimes challenge 
the singing or the victrola music, and then they 
will be chased off with stones. 

We begin with a lively record and the crowd 
soon gathers. By far the favourites in our reper- 
tory are “ The Mocking Bird” and “ The Whistler 
and His Dog.” It is fearfully entertaining to 
watch the faces of those who are hearing the 
“sounding-box ” for the first time. Startled sur- 
prise is followed by consternation, and then by a 
pleased smile, and then a chuckle and finally a 
burst of laughter. And oh, the delight, the rap- 
ture of the youngsters, when the “ bird ” trills in- 
side the box! They will often creep forward 
on all fours to get a peep of him. And when the 
“ whistler’ whistles for his dog, our Fuzzle will 
run forward and cock his ears, and our audience 
will rock with laughter. I often think it would be 
worth while to come and cheer up those grey lives 
with the victrola, even if we did not get in any 
religion! But we do get in the religious part of it. 
The music is only an introduction, like the negro 
boosters who stand outside a show and attract you 
to what is inside. We proceed with lots of sing- 
ing and some simple addresses, and an invitation 
to all and every one to come and see us some day 
at camp. And then we tramp or cycle back to our 


62 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


tents, and try to get a few hours’ sleep under the 
wide and starry tropical sky before a new day 
dawns, with its new but always multifarious prob- 
lems. 


V 
MISSIONARY MOVIES 


P “HE Rev. William Wilberforce had the 
honour of being nominated by the 
Government to become a member of the 

Barispoor Municipal Council which consisted of 
eighteen members—six nominated by the Govern- 
ment and twelve elected by popular vote. The 
work involved did not take up a great deal of time, 
and it brought him in touch with the non-Christian 
leaders of the town. Every meeting of the Council 
was a revelation in Indian psychology, and he prob- 
ably learned more in that way than he could have 
done from years of book study. 

His first discovery was that the majority of the 
elected members were there from no sense of pub- 
lic duty but because they had some axe to grind, 
either a private axe or the axe of their caste and 
community. ‘The Brahmans would vote en bloc 
for their interests, the Mohammedans for theirs, 
and the Wanis (merchants) for theirs, and would 
sit more or less stolid and indifferent when any 
measure was being discussed that had no direct 
bearing on their affairs. Of course, such a thing 


has been known to happen in countries that have 
63 


64 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


more political experience than India! But here, 
there was not even an attempt at camouflage. 

The Collector of the District, on his annual tour, 
took exception to the number and size of verandahs 
and unauthorized booths projecting from shop- 
fronts on the main streets and thus reducing the 
width of the same to dangerously narrow propor- 
tions. He ordered that a limit be set and a tax 
levied on such encroachments. N ow, there were 
several wealthy tradesmen on the Council who 
would be affected; so they drew up a proposal that 
the taxes on various streets should vary, and so 
worked it out that on the streets where they had 
their shops the encroachment tax was light—al- 
most negligible, whereas on the streets of the small 
tradespeople it was exceedingly heavy! And in 
spite of the protest of the missionary-sahib, this 
was put to the vote and passed! 

Election time in Barispoor, as in other parts of 
the world, was distinguished by a lot of ill-feeling 
and a lot of political and personal mud-throwing, 
and the results were often challenged. Many of 
the electors being illiterate, the mode of voting was 
to erect large and highly-coloured portraits of the 
candidates, with a box beneath each. Into this 
box the voter would drop a marble which auto- 
matically rang a bell, thus warning those in charge 
of the booths that a vote had been registered—and 
not more than one! Well, at one election, one of 
the candidates won by only one vote—i. é., marble, 


MISSIONARY MOVIES 65 


and his political opponents got up the cry that 
there had been cheating, and that the successful 
candidate’s supporters had been seen to drop an 
extra marble into his box! They came to the sahib 
and begged him to demand an investigation. Hear- 
ing this, the other side hastened to our bungalow 
to “explain.” They acknowledged having dropped 
in an extra marble, but on this wise—the auto- 
matic bell under their candidate’s portrait was re- 
ported not to be working clearly, so, in order to 
test it, they got permission to drop in a marble! 
But, at the count up of the votes, this marble was 
discounted!! And, to the end of the chapter, the 
matter was never cleared up. 

When Bill was put on the Education Committee 
he hoped to help improve the rather stagnant con- 
dition of the schools, but found it difficult to get 
anybody to geta move on. Then plague broke out, 
and practically everybody, rich and poor, moved 
out of the town and lived in impromptu huts of 
mud or iron sheets, erected on the open prairie. 
The schools of course were all closed and the 
teachers idle but drawing their full pay, and the 
children running wild. ‘The missionary-sahib sug- 
gested that for a few hours each day the teachers 
hold open-air school beside the temporary habita- 
tions. Ridiculous! Preposterous! Such a thing 
had never been heard of in all the years since 
plague began its annual visitations. What other 
staggering proposal might not this foreigner make, 


66 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


and perhaps carry out? ‘The only safe way would 
be to get him off the committee! 

Well, no Education Committee was called for 
over three months. Then we went out for a week’s 
tour quite near Barispoor, and when we came back 
Bill accidentally heard that there was to be an 
Education Committee the next day. But no notice 
of it arrived. Thinking there had been a slip he 
wrote over a note to the chairman, and was in- 
formed that as he had been absent from the Edu- 
cation Committee meetings three times in succes- 
sion without sending an excuse, he ipso facto, ac- 
cording to the rules of the Municipal Council, 
ceased to be a member! 

Bill was astounded. What three meetings? 
Oh, three meetings that were held while he was 
out in camp! ‘The rule was repeated, with great 
emphasis on the ipso facto. Now, the whole af- 
fair was so funny that Bill thought he would pur- 
sue it further. He hunted up the rules and dis- 
covered one that said a member must get twenty- 
four hours’ notice before any committee meeting. 
He pointed this out to the chairman and assured 
him that if he had received a notice of any or all 
of those three committee meetings he could easily 
have come in for them, being only six miles out 
of Barispoor. The reply was that a notice had 
been sent by the official Municipal messenger. Bill 
now probed into this matter and discovered that 
it was perfectly true that the official messenger had 


MISSIONARY MOVIES 67 


been sent to our bungalow, but . . . he had 
been instructed to find out from our people how 
long the missionary-sahib was going to be out of 
town! 

So we had the laugh on our side after all, and 
when the chairman and his accomplices saw their 
little plot hadn’t worked, they merely smiled with- 
out giving themselves away, and at the next gen- 
eral meeting of the Council, Bill was ipso facto 
reinstated. 

In Barispoor, as in most other Indian towns, the 
entire outcaste community was unrepresented on 
the Municipality, and had therefore no channels 
whereby to air their grievances or demand their 
rights. And they certainly did have grievances, 
quite apart from the centuries-old grievance of be- 
ing the depressed classes and kept outside the town 
or village wall and entirely beyond the pale of 
everything. In Barispoor, for instance, when a 
fine water supply was laid on, and the town, for 
the first time in its ancient history, had running 
water, a pipe carried the water to the exclusive 
club of the high-caste men about half a mile or 
more outside the town. ‘This pipe actually passed 
the section where the outcastes lived, yet they were 
not allowed to tap it and have a faucet of their 
own. ‘They had to go on carrying their water in 
large, heavy vessels from the well, as they had done 
from time immemorial. And not one of the caste 
men on the Council would lift his finger to help 


68 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


them. But some years ago the Government, how- 
ever, amended the Municipal Act and allowed the 
outcaste communities to submit a name for ap- 
pointment on the Councils. The Barispoor de- 
pressed classes called a mass meeting, with the mis- 
sionary-sahib as chairman, and sent a petition to 
the Collector to nominate their leader, Sakharam. 
We had known Sakharam for years and had no 
hesitation about giving him a boost, as he was 
comparatively well-educated and comparatively 
honourable. 

When the caste members of the Council heard 
that Sakharam had actually been appointed, they 
were furious both with the outcastes and with Bill. 
The Brahmans resigned on the spot, and not one 
of the other caste members gave Sakharam the 
right hand of fellowship. He was absolutely “ sent 
to Coventry’; so Bill took him under his wing, 
introduced him at his first Council meeting, and 
sat with him at the extreme end of the table in 
pointed isolation, chuckling inwardly at the humour 
of being one of the two undesirables! 

Sakharam fortunately had grit enough to ignore 
every snub and slight, and by sheer force of char- 
acter and imperturbability has kept his position and 
is now at least respected. The lot of the depressed 
classes has improved immensely, and they revel in 
the running water now supplied them by a munic- 
ipal pipe run right into their section of the town! 
So, in spite of the slight impression we felt our- 


MISSIONARY MOVIES 69 


selves making on the immemorial usages and cus- 
toms of life in Barispoor, we at least helped the 
outcastes to help themselves. 


On one of our district tours we visited a village 
which had been decimated by influenza. In one 
house a young man was lying desperately ill; and 
the tearful old father was wailing beside him. iF: 
transpired that the poor old man had lost his wife 
just four days previously, and felt sure he was 
going to lose his boy too. We sympathized suit- 
ably, we thought. Then, as Indian courtesy allows 
and welcomes, we enquired about the other mem- 
bers of the household, who were all sitting round 
listening. 

“ And who is this?” I asked, indicating a young- 
ish woman crouching by the side of the sick-bed. 

“ She?” replied the old fellow casually. Oh; 
she’s only my new wife.” 


We had been asked to go to a village at “ the 
back of beyond” and ten miles from our camp. 
We set off on our cycles but had not gone far be- 
fore Bill’s tyre punctured. He mended it but it 
gave out twice again. By this time the day was far 
advanced and the tyre seemed perfectly hopeless ; 
so I suggested that Bill go ahead on my cycle while 
I sat under a tree and waited for him. I had 
learned from long experience to carry a book along 
with me in case of unexpected delays or emergen- 


70 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


cies. So Bill saw me comfortably settled under a 
big shady tree some distance from the nearest vil- 
lage; and as I saw his topi disappear through the 
trees and knew he could not possibly be back for 
three hours at least, I stretched out luxuriously and 
started to read. 

An Indian man suddenly appeared from no- 
where and stood directly in front of me. I sa- 
laamed, but he ignored my greeting and fired a 
volley of questions at me, spitting vociferously and 
emphatically between each one. ‘“ Who are you? 

Where do you come from? . . . How 
old are you? . . . Why are you sitting here? 

Got no husband? . . . You have? 
ihren why has he gone off and left you? [this with 
decided suspicion].” 

I answered his queries to the best of my ability, 
and he evidently found me an entirely new “ type,” 
for he put his hands to his mouth and let out an 
ear-piercing “halloo” to summon his friends. 
And they came—practically the whole village, big 
and little. He showed me off exactly as if I were 
the fat lady or the fasting man or the performing 
chicken in a side-show. And then the same ques- 
tions were repeated, over and over again, and 
dozens more, as each fresh visitor appeared on the 
scene. ‘They were specially curious about the hus- 
band and why he had deserted me. I pointed dra- 
matically to the dilapidated cycle as proof positive 
that there was such a thing as a husband and that 





THe GIRL TO THE LEFT AND HER BrRotTHER IN FroNtT WERE 
3ARELY SAVED FROM STARVATION. THEY ARE NOW STRAPPING 
HicH ScHooi STuDENTS. 





MISSIONARY MOVIES V1 


he would probably come back for me. But they 
shook their heads. They knew better. Who ever 
heard of a man dumping his wife down by the 
roadside unless he had got tired of her and gone 
off and left her? 

I tried to entertain my uninvited guests by sing- 
ing to them and telling them stories about our re- 
ligion; but all my efforts fell flat. No white 
woman had ever been seen in that region before, 
and all they wanted was to gaze with impunity. 
And they did. For three solid hours I sat there 
surrounded by dozens and dozens of pairs of spar- 
kling brown eyes, looking me through and through 
with unblinking insistence. Since then I have had 
the deepest sympathy with animals in the Zoo. I 
know just how they feel and how difficult it is to 
look outwardly polite and nonchalant when one is 
inwardly fuming with resentment at being re- 
garded as a “ specimen.” 

I would have walked off long before had I not 
been handicapped by the broken-down bicycle, but 
Bill had detached the front wheel and had gone off 
with the tool-bag, so I was helpless. But about 
four in the afternoon I decided to risk leaving the 
cycle in somebody’s care, and got the least disagree- 
able man in the crowd to promise to keep it in his 
house till we sent for it the next day. I rose, sa- 
laamed to the still-open-mouthed crowd, and was 
just setting out when . . . I caught sight ofa 
white thing bobbing up and down among the trees. 


V2 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


Bill’s topi! Never did the sight of an ugly sun- 
helmet induce such a spasm of delight. For I was 
completely justified. Here was a live husband. 
He hadn’t deserted me but had actually come back 
forme. My reputation was saved! 

And the whole village escorted us for half a 
mile, and when I looked back at the first welcome 
bend of the road that was to take us out of sight, 
they were still gaping! 


Supplies were scarce in camp, except rice, milk, 
eggs, and scraggy chickens; but, thanks to Bill’s 
old rifle, we sometimes had venison. As the rifle 
was far from accurate, Bill did not always have 
good “luck” and could conveniently blame it all 
on the rifle. With his first box of cartridges his 
trophies amounted to one black buck and a man’s 
toe! The last was no discredit to him, for the man 
had taken the loaded rifle (warned by Bill) and 
had absent-mindedly turned it upside down, stead- 
ied it on his little toe, and pulled the trigger. It 
was an expensive toe for us. We felt responsible 
for getting the man well, so had to send him away 
down to Barispoor to the best doctor available— 
or rather, the least unqualified one! ‘The bill was 
unusually large—simply because a white man was 
going to pay it, and we supported the patient’s 
enormous family during his absence. You can im- 
agine how large that family is when I mention that 
the mother tells me she can never remember how 


MISSIONARY MOVIES 73 


many children she has till they are all sleeping in 
a row on the floor at night. 

But we had any amount of fun out of that an- 
cient rifle. The first buck that fell to it was one of 
three handsome antelope that simply strolled across 
the field in front of our tents. But the second vic- 
tim gave us a lot of trouble, both alive and dead. 
In cycling to a new camping-ground we missed our 
way and made a tiresome roundabout that landed 
us miles from camp. On gaining the top of a 
slight rise we almost ran into a large herd of hill 
antelope, but they scattered before Bill could untie 
his gun. I fear I taunted him with his unreadi- 
ness, for he made up his mind he would get one of 
those deer anyway, and just show me! He made 
off over the rising ground and disappeared. ‘Then 
I spied a fine black buck double back on his tracks, 
so Fuzzle and I decided to round him up for the 
sahib’s gun. We were both exhausted, but we cir- 
cled that buck and dodged that buck, and circled 
and dodged him again . . . andlosthim. But 
just then we heard a shot, and a minute later the 
conquering hero appeared over the hillock drag- 
ging his prize—a four-year-old buck weighing 
probably a hundred pounds. 

The question now was, how to get him to our 
distant camp, but fortunately we were not far from 
a village where the weekly bazaar was being held 
that day, and we were thankful to see a string of 
bullock-carts and pedestrians coming along the 


TA OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


road. We hailed the first driver and asked him to 
take the buck in his empty cart. He didn’t even 
answer! He just looked through us and drove 
steadily past. ‘The same with the second and the 
third. Then of course it dawned on us. These 
were caste men who could not pollute themselves 
or their precious cart with a dead thing! We tried 
some men, afoot; but they were just as particular. 

‘There was nothing for it but to negotiate it for 
ourselves. Bill fastened the buck on to his handle- 
bars by means of Fuzzle’s chain, and wobbled un- 
steadily along. Then poor old Fuzzle gave out, so 
Bill lifted him up and carried him under one arm 
while with the other.he guided the over-weighted 
bike. I was riding ahead but jumped off when I 
heard an ominous scramble, and looked back in 
time to see a sight for the gods—a white man and 
a dead buck and a live puppy all sprawling on the 
ground and mixed up with a prostrate bicycle! 

On reaching the village we had the luck to run 
across an outcaste Christian who was delighted to 
carry the buck to camp, six miles off; and as I 
automatically pedalled on and on and on and on, 
the one thing that bore me up and made me almost 
forget my fatigue, was the thought that we would 
soon catch sight of a cheery camp with our faithful 
Krishna moving round, and an appetizing aroma of 
dinner to welcome us. But, alas, the camp was 
black. There was neither the glow of a fire nor of 
a lamp, and Krishna was stretched out prostrate 


MISSIONARY MOVIES 75 


with a kind of spasm. It was just the last straw 
to an overpowering day; but there was nothing for 
it but to get busy and cook dinner. Our Christians 
carried off the buck and skinned it and cut it up, 
and we let them have it all except what little we 
needed, and a savoury liver was soon sizzling on the 
frying-pan. 

But we had not yet done with our buck. High- 
caste men seldom eat meat; so we were amazed to 
hear, on the quiet, that a wealthy Maratha of the 
village was highly offended with us for not present- 
ing him with some venison. Bill went at once to 
his house and explained that we had thought it im- 
possible that he, a caste man, would eat meat at all, 
and especially a deer shot by a sahib, carried by an 
outcaste Christian, and cut up in the outcaste quar- 
ter of his own village. If any meat could ever be 
called ceremonially unclean, surely that could. But 
our friend merely smiled in non-committal fashion 
and let the matter drop. Later on in the day, we 
heard that he was disappointed at not yet having 
received any venison, so we hastened to send him 
surreptitiously the shoulder we had kept for our- 
selves, and we received his surreptitious thanks! 
It was amusing to see that caste, which would re- 
fuse to take a carcase into an empty cart, could 
yield to friendship. Or was it the savoury smell of 
the pottage? 


VI 


THE PEOPLE AMONG WHOM WE 
DWELT 


UPPOSE that in democratic little old Amer- 
GS ica one-fifth of the population were com- 
pelled to live outside the bounds of their 
town or village and were only allowed to step in- 
side at certain hours of the day and with certain 
restrictions, being forbidden to cross anybody’s 
threshold or draw water from anybody’s faucet? 
Can you imagine what kind of social order would 
result? Could you expect much in the way of 
brotherhood? . . . of liberty, equality and 
fraternity? 
Yet that is exactly what we have in India—sixty 
millions of human beings living beyond the pale of 
ordinary society. ‘The strong village walls which, 


in the days of lawlessness, were necessary safe- 


guards against raiders but which now, under the 
just and mild rule of a foreign Government, are 
often crumbling and unrepaired, are still effective 
barriers between caste and outcaste. On the out- 
side of the walls, and often some distance from 
them, cluster groups of huts—the homes of the 
depressed classes where they live and move and 
have their being and multiply prodigiously. On 
no account must they mix with their betters inside 
76 


a ee se ee ee 


AMONG WHOM WE DWELT ey 


the walls. They have their own outcaste wells, and 
if these dry up in the hot weather they may not 
touch the caste wells, however plentiful the supply 
may be. They must either hire a caste man to 
bring them water from his well, or then they must 
walk till they find it. In the famine of 1918 we 
knew outcastes who walked three miles to a muddy 
pool to fetch a little water for their thirst-ridden 
families! 

Caste, then, is a cruel encroachment on personal 
liberty. In fact, orthodox Indian society is di- 
vided and subdivided into numerous castes and sub- 
castes which are like water-compartments. The 
compartment into which a man is born is his fate 

his nasheeb, depending partly on his be- 
haviour in a former existence, and partly on the 
whim of the gods; and in this god-given compart- 
ment he must live and marry and die. The gold- 
smith’s son, for instance, must marry a goldsmith’s 
daughter and bring up a family of boys who will 
be goldsmiths and of girls who will marry gold- 
smiths; and when he dies his funeral will be con- 
ducted and his soul will be cared for with all the 
ceremonies sanctioned by immemorial usage in the 
goldsmiths’ caste. No wealth or effort on his part, 
no turn of fortune’s wheel, could ever lift him out 
of his caste and deposit him in any other. The in- 
evitable result of such a system is, of course, the 
opposite of brotherhood, except within the limits 
of one’s own particular sub-caste. Caste, there- 


78 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


fore, is the greatest barrier to a religion which 
emphasizes the Fatherhood of God and the broth- 
erhood of man. 

Yet it is marvellous to see how caste is showing 
signs of loosening up—especially in the cities. 
Men of all castes are glad of the trolley-car and 
have to sit in it side-by side with those whose very 
shadow ought to spell ceremonial pollution but 
who, having paid the same fare, are entitled to the 
same privileges. The same holds good for railway 
trains and steamboats and other means of convey- 
ance, for the Indian is fond of travel, and even 
poor Indians who do not get enough to eat, can 
always scrape up a railway fare to go on a jaunt. 
Education, of course, is a potent factor. The sons 
of goldsmiths do not, now, invariably follow their 
traditional profession. ‘Those of them who get a 
good high school or college education may go into 
Government offices or even into business. Increas- 
ing numbers are seeking education and culture 
abroad, and they simply must sacrifice caste restric- 
tions in order to visit Europe or America. An 
expensive purification ceremony on their return is 
supposed to wash away the pollution thus acquired, 
but the point is that they are finding new interests 
in life for which they are willing to let down the 
old strict prohibitions of caste rules. 

In Barispoor we were happy to number our 
friends in both high caste and low caste circles and 
among those of no caste whatever—the outcastes. 


AMONG WHOM WE DWELT 719 


Out of all the grades and sub-grades of Indian so- 
ciety with which we came in contact I shall choose 
just three examples—high, medium, and low. 


At the very top of the social scale stands the 
Brahman—intellectual, cultured, exclusive, con- 
scious of his superiority both as a twice-born in- 
dividual and as belonging to the priestly caste, the 
acknowledged leaders of the people. In the old 
days the Brahmans were primarily the spiritual 
leaders, officiating as priests at the numerous re- 
ligious ceremonies, advisers to the king and court, 
and in possession of all the chief political offices. 
But now in these prosaic modern days their su- 
perior intellect and education put them into many 
important and responsible posts, as collectors, 
judges, magistrates; while great numbers are 
clerks in Government offices and in the railway 
and other public bodies. 

In Barispoor we had many Brahman friends. 
One of them was a successful lawyer, and such a 
progressive thinker that he allowed his daughter 
to reach the great age of sixteen before having her 
married! Shortly afterwards she died of con- 
sumption, and his orthodox friends pointed out 
that this was an inevitable result of the folly of 
educating a woman and not marrying her off when 
she was young! 

This Brahman lawyer was very friendly with 
us but had no use for Christianity for himself 


80 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


though he was glad, he said, that we came and 
helped the despicable outcastes with whom the 
Brahmans could not and would not concern them- 
selves. He had a tremendous admiration for the 
American Republic as the ideal form of govern- 
ment. In fact, everything American was good and 
everything British was bad, for our friend had an 
idea that America, being the land of the free, was 
a place where people could do as they liked and 
get what they wanted. Now Bill, though a good, 
sound American, found himself increasingly ap- 
preciative of Britain as he saw for himself her 
handling of difficult and delicate situations. And so 
there would follow some earnest but, to me, highly 
amusing discussions in which the American was 
emphatically pro-British and the Indian violently 
pro-American. 

One day the Brahman came to the bungalow in 
great haste and excitement and asked for the sahib. 
Bill was away at a village, so my visitor told me 
they wanted him to be chairman at a public meet- 
ing in the evening. I tried to find out what sort 
of meeting it was but he, probably having a con- 
tempt for the female intelligence, refused to di- 
vulge the nature of it. He tried to get me to 
promise definitely that Bill would preside, as they 
wanted to announce it immediately. I knew 
enough of Indian ways to refuse to entangle Bill 
with any such promise, so invited our friend to 
call again in the late afternoon, when the sahib 


AMONG WHOM WE DWELT 8] 


would be sure to be home. He did so, and of 
course had to explain to Bill what the meeting was 
about. It was to be a public protest against the 
Government’s “ high-handed action” in interning 
Mrs. Besant. (Mrs. Besant, at this time, had been 
engaged in violent agitation, and after being very 
patient and lenient with her the Government had 
at last imposed a very mild form of internment— 
confining her within the Madras Presidency.) 
“And you, Mr. Wilberforce,” added the Brahman, 
“being an American, must feel just as indignant 
over this injustice as we do. In your free land, 
where every one has a right to air his opinions, a 
thing like this could never happen. ‘Therefore, I 
know that you will be a sympathetic chairman.” 

Bill lay back in his chair and laughed. “In my 
free land,” he said, “ we certainly allow freedom 
of speech—but within limits. I’m amazed at the 
forbearance of the British Government. I think 
Mrs. Besant should have been interned long before 
now, and I’m perfectly sure that had the Ameri- 
can Government been in charge here, it would have 
put the kibosh on her months ago!”’ Our friend 
went away quite puzzled and a little hurt. The 
protest meeting took place, but the only American 
in the town was not the chairman! 

Another Brahman friend of ours was a rich 
banker, well-educated, imposing, and sophisticated. 
I used to visit his two wives (who called each 
other “ Sister” and by doing so puzzled me not a 


82 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


little, at first, as to their relationship) and the 
other women in his gaudy home, and I always 
smiled inwardly at the strange admixture of East 
and West. This man had a liking for the things 
he saw in a white man’s home, and he had bought 
and placed in his public room all sorts of furniture 
which rightly belong to other rooms in a house. 
I don’t think it was used by the women at 
all, for they would push the gaily-upholstered 
chairs aside (all but one reserved for me) and 
squat on the beautifully-tiled floor, with their backs 
propped against the marble-topped wash-stand 
which stood in the middle of the drawing-room, 
just exactly as they had been accustomed to squat 
on their ordinary mud floors. If the master of the 
house happened to come in, they would all scurry 
out of sight like frightened rabbits, as became well- 
brought-up Brahman women, and would watch fur- 
tively from behind pillars and through half-open 
doors, while the brazen white woman actually sat 
in the presence of their lord and master, and talked 
with him about the political situation, the Barispoor 
elections, and other unfeminine topics. 

But our most familiar friend among the Brah- 
mans was a man of immense dignity and reserve, 
and a deep and eager thinker. He was a teacher 
in the local English school, and he tutored us in 
Marathi; but many a time we would forget the 
immediate task in hand and get involved in some 
long philosophical discussion which would run half 


AMONG WHOM WE DWELT 83 


an hour or even an hour over the usual lesson 
time. Like the lawyer, this man was fond of us 
personally and he positively loved tus when we 
showed appreciation of his favourite classics. He 
also, like our lawyer friend, admired our self-sac- 
rifice in working among the untouchables, but he 
said frankly that it was a vain hope that educated 
India would ever become Christian even, in so 
much, as the zominal sense of the word. 

The religion of these men is hard to define. 
They were too well educated to believe implicitly 
in the potency of material idols or in the weird 
cosmogony of Hinduism, but they were intensely 
orthodox in outward observances of rites and cere- 
monies. 

Brahman converts are few, for they are a proud 
and stiff-necked people, perfectly satisfied with 
their exclusive position and sublimely unconscious 
of any need for anything better. We admire their 
intellect and culture, and while it is hard to forget 
their treatment of the depressed classes, we try to 
remember that their attitude is a heritage which has 
come down through the ages from the days when 
the battle was to the strong, no matter whether 
physical, mental, or spiritual strength was involved. 


It is often said that the backbone of Western 
India is the Maratha. Most Marathas are farm- 
ers, hard-working, stolid and conservative in their 
work and ways, backward in education, slow to 


84 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


respond to any political impetus, but an immense 
reservoir of latent strength. They do not live in 
the midst of their land, but for the sake of protec- 
tion stay in the nearest village and go out to their 
field-work every morning. 

In some districts modern methods are in use, and 
you can see iron ploughs drawn by a quaint team 
of bullocks with perhaps a buffalo or two to round 
out the requisite number. But, for the most part, 
the Maratha uses an old-fashioned plough, a 
wooden concoction made by the village carpenter 
which merely tickles the surface of the ground. It 
is hard to convince him that a new-fangled inven- 
tion would ensure better crops and that it actually 
has done so in such and such a place. He will 
shake his red-turbaned head, spit out the scarlet 
juice of the betel-nut he has been chewing while 
he listened to you, and remark in a tone of fatality 
and finality, “What was good enough for my fa- 
ther and my grandfather and my great-grandfa- 
ther and all my fathers away back to the time of 
the gods and the giants . . . well, that’s good 
enough for me.” Ay, it’s a hard life, a farmer’s 

toil, toil, toil from morning till night, year 
in and year out. And now and again will come a 
famine year when there isn’t an ear of corn to be 
seen. And if it be near the time for the breaking 
of the rains he will lift his heavy head and scan 
the brassy, cloudless sky with anxious eyes. “It’s 
our fate—our nasheeb. What can one do?” he 


AMONG WHOM WE DWELT 85 


will say as he sighs. And yet, you know, you have 
just been telling him what he might do! _ 

This fatal fatalism of the Marathas was very 
noticeable in the famine of 1918, when practically 
there were no crops in this part of India and 
therefore no fodder. It began to cost more to feed 
a bullock than a human being. The Marathas sold 
their cattle for half-price, then for quarter-price, 
then for a few rupees, and finally gave them away 
for nothing. But nobody would take them, for 
nobody could afford to feed them. And by and 
by, in the fields and by the roadside we would see 
the whitening skeletons of bullocks and buffaloes, 
goats and horses, chewed clean by the jackals and 
the pariah dogs after starving human beings had 
clawed off every eatable scrap. But there is one 
plant which grows to profusion in India and is 
considered a vicious pest—the prickly pear. The 
Government experimented to ascertain whether 
this plant could not possibly be made useful. They 
burned off the thorns, chopped the leaves fine, and 
mixed them with a little meal or chopped grain- 
stalks. They found this an excellent fodder. 
Demonstration stations were opened in numerous 
centres, and the farmers were shown healthy cat- 
tle fed, day by day, on nothing but this prepared 
prickly pear. They were urged to follow suit and 
thus tide over the time till the next crop. A few 
were persuaded, but the great majority shook their 
heads and declared that the thing could not be 


«86 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


done. Why? Their one irrefutable argument was, 
that if God had meant the prickly pear to be used 
for fodder then He would have made it without 
thorns! And so thousands of valuable cattle died 
of preventable starvation, and when the next rains 
did break, there were not enough draught bullocks 
to do the ploughing; and some good ground ac- 
tually lay unsown because the owners had not the 
money either to buy or to hire bullocks to prepare 
it. 

I love to watch the Marathas ploughing with a 
team of ten or twelve. There are usually two men, 
one to walk alongside shouting and flourishing his 
whip and twisting the tail of any obstreperous 
bullock, and the other in the rear to guide the 
plough. On one of our camping tours we pitched 
our tents near a field which the Marathas were 
ploughing. They used eleven bullocks and one lone 
buffalo. Fuzzle strolled across to see what all the 
noise was about and to bark his disapproval. Then 
he spied a rope dangling from the shoulder of the. 
rear Maratha, so ran up and seized it with his 
teeth, and pulled and pulled, trying to keep the 
whole cavalcade back. You could not believe how 
droll it looked—the tiny puppy pitting his puny 
powers against a dozen draught animals and, to 
his intense indignation, being dragged ignomini- 
ously along in the furrow, his four feet sliding 
helplessly through the soft earth. Even the usu- 
ally imperturbable Maratha saw the humour of it 


AMONG WHOM WE DWELT 87 


and shouted to his friend to look; and we could 
hear their bass guffaws right across the field. 

The Maratha, being a practical man who earns 
his daily bread with the sweat of his brow, does 
not concern himself much with religion or phi- 
losophy. He leaves all that to the learned Brahman 
priests whom he will call in on important family 
occasions—births, betrothals, coming-of-age cere- 
monies, marriages, deaths, post-death anniversaries. 
But every morning when he gets up he will bathe 
and worship the little brass gods and goddesses 
that stand in a niche in his wall; and as he goes 
out to his fields he will make an obeisance to 
Maruti, the monkey-god, whose shrine is usually 
diplomatically placed right beside the chief gate. 
In his fields he will also have a little shrine to 
Khandoba, the god of the shepherds, and potent 
to bless or curse the flocks. And near harvest- 
time he will give a coat of whitewash to the “ aus- 
picious ” stones set up in his fields. 

One of our Maratha acquaintances came to us 
in tears, during the influenza epidemic, and asked 
for medicine for his sick boy. 

“Have you brought a bottle?” I asked. He 
held one up. 

“But what is that in it?” I continued. “Isn't 
it medicine? ”’ 

“ Oh, yes,” he said, “ but it’s only the dispensary 
medicine. They say your ‘influenza medicine- 
water’ has cured a lot of people. I’d rather have 


88 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


it,’ and he was about to uncork and empty his 
bottle. I stopped him in time, as I didn’t want the 
reputation of encouraging my patients to throw 
away the dispensary medicine. I suggested that he 
might use both. We gave him a bottle of our mix- 
ture, and Bill, at this Hindu farmer’s request, 
prayed to the Christian’s God to have mercy. ‘The 
child’s life was spared—whether because of our 
medicine or the municipal dispensary medicine or 
Bill’s prayer, who can tell? But since then the 
grateful father has been most friendly towards 
us, and very good to the Christian people in his 
village. 

The Marathas are beginning to wake up from 
their torpor. They are sending more of their boys 
and some of their girls to school. In some places 
they are beginning to resent the dominance of the 
Brahmans and to fight for political rights. In 
one Native State the Maratha ruler has displaced 
Brahman employees with non-Brahman men just 
as soon as he could get enough of them sufficiently 
educated and trained for the respective Govern- 
ment posts. Many Marathas, too, have joined the 
Satya-shodaks—a comparatively new religious 
movement the name of which means “ T'ruth- 
seekers ’’ and one of whose principal tenets is the 
equality of men. There is a great future for the 
Marathas when they come into their own, and the 
future of Western India will depend very largely 
on how they use their power. 


ee 


AMONG WHOM WE DWELT 89 


The outcastes, like their superiors, are subdi- 
vided into numerous sections with hard and fast 
lines of distinction; and feeling often runs as high 
and bitter between them as between caste and out- 
caste. But there are two main groups in Western 
India. 

The Mahars, who consider themselves much 
superior to the others, are the official messengers, 
sent here and there at the beck and call of the 
village headman. They also have a right to every 
animal that dies a natural death. When a farmer 
loses a bullock or buffalo or goat from any ail- 
ment whatsoever, he must not console himself by 
making what he can out of the hide and hoofs. He 
must simply leave the animal lying where it fell, 
and send word to the Mahars. He seldom needs 
to do so, however, for, like vultures, the Mahars 
scent out their prospective prey and are on the qut 
vive for the actual death. Then they pounce on 
the carcase, take it to their quarter holus-bolus, and 
eat it raw. No more revolting sight can meet even 
sophisticated eyes than a crowd of excited Mahars 
swarming round the loot and clamouring for their 
pound of flesh—diseased flesh—as one of their 
leaders cuts it up and distributes it according to 
each family’s hereditary share. In return for these 
public services the Mahars own a piece of com- 
munity land in whose yield they share. They also 
do field labour for the Marathas and get paid in 
kind. 


90 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


The great majority of the Christians of Western 
India come from the Mahars, but in our particular 
parish more than nine-tenths of our people are 
from the still lower group, the Mangs. The Mangs 
are by profession rope-makers and broom-makers, 
and unprofessionally they are first-class thieves and 
liars. Probably because it takes a thief to catch a 
thief they are also the village watchmen, and in 
return for this job they receive offerings in kind— 
a handful of grain from each householder. Most 
Mangs are dirty in their persons and habits and 
homes—dirtier than the Mahars, which is saying 
a good deal. But they are warm-hearted, generous 
impulsive and hot-tempered. They are riddled 
with family feuds that last from generation to 
generation; and a Mang quarrel is the last thing in 
expressiveness ! 

It was a puzzle to us to know how to accept 
Mang hospitality without squirming, but we felt it — 
was not the slightest use to try and be district mis- 
sionaries unless we could visit filthy houses with 
equanimity and, what was more, eat food prepared 
in them! Permanganate of potash was the solu- 
tion. We always carry a small vial of permanga- 
nate with us and before attacking a doubtful meal 
in a doubtful house, disinfect our interiors by swill- 
ing down a big draught of well-permanganated 
water; and though it by no means eliminates the 
dirt, it probably saves us from most of the germs. 
Our hosts ask us why we put these funny things 


AMONG WHOM WE DWELT 91 


in the water, and we say “ doctor’s orders,” which 
is absolutely true, for we had a missionary doctor- 
friend to “ prescribe” this medicine for us! 

Both Mahars and Mangs, like other poor In- 
dians, are apt to be in the grip of the money- 
lender. In hard times, with nothing at all laid by 
for a rainy day (though in India the hard times 
come with the non-rainy days!) they have no re- 
course but to borrow. When a family wedding 
comes along they must make as brave a show as 
such-and-such a family did. So they plunge wildly, 
magnificently, into debt which they know they can 
never repay—a debt which will hang like a mill- 
stone round their own necks and their children’s 
necks and the necks of their children’s children. 
Many a man at this very day is paying interest on 
a debt contracted fifty years ago at his own grand- 
father’s wedding. And interest at six per cent. per 
month is no light consideration, It only takes six- 
teen months to pay as interest a sum equal to the 
original amount borrowed, so that in fifty years 
a family will have paid a creditor forty times the 
capital. And in numerous cases the rate of interest 
is double this—actually two annas in the rupee per 
month—one-eighth of the capital sum—twelve and 
a half per cent. per month! On pay-day at the 
mill in Barispoor we would see whole rows of 
rascally money-lenders squatting at the mill-gate, 
ready to waylay their victims and bleed them of 
their whole pay before they could get it, either 


92 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


home or to the drink-shop. And what can the 
poor wretches do but incur fresh debts? 

It is often asked why the majority of our native 
Christians are from the depressed classes and why 
we do not make more efforts among the better 
classes? There are two main reasons. In the first 
place, most missions definitely work for the 
outcastes because théy feel that they need us 
most and that, like Christ, we should begin 
with the poor and lowly. The other reason 
is that, given an equal appeal to a caste man 
and an outcaste, it is infinitely easier for the 
latter to respond; for, whereas the caste man in 
becoming a Christian will probably lose family and 
earthly possessions and everything he has so far 
counted precious, the outcaste has practically noth- 
ing to lose but everything to gain. It is a cure 
for depression to look at some of our Christians 
of outcaste origin—now useful and respectable and 
self-respecting citizens, and holding posts of re- 
sponsibility and honour, such as pastors, teachers, 
carpentry masters, clerks, contractors. Many of 
them bring with them faults and failings that dis- 
tract the missionary and make him sometimes won- 
der whether it is at all worth while? But lying, de- 
ceit, dishonesty, intrigue, improvidence—these are 
all largely the heritage of environment; and im- 
proved economical and social conditions are slowly 
but surely bearing fruit. 

There is no doubt that the status enjoyed by 


AMONG WHOM WE DWELT 93 


Christians is an attraction to outcastes conscious 
of their disabilities, and one cannot wonder that 
many converts have mixed motives. Recently 
there was a mass meeting of outcastes down in 
south India, who had come to the place where 
they could no longer tolerate their treatment—espe- 
cially the fact that they must not go within a cer- 
tain number of yards of any Brahman. They de- 
cided that the only way out of their difficulties was 
to change their religion, but the question was 
whether they should become Mohammedans or 
Christians! A select committee was appointed to 
weigh the arguments of a Christian pastor and a 
Mohammedan moulvie respectively, prepare a 
memorandum on the subject, and submit it at the 
next mass meeting! 


Vil 
A PILGRIMAGE, TO PANDHARPUR 


\ LONG the dusty Indian highway trails a 


sorry little group—several grown-ups, half 

a dozen children, and a couple of babies. 
One baby rides on its father’s head and the other 
on its mother’s hip. Two of the party carry long 
sticks with saffron-coloured flags on the end, and 
most of them have bundles on their heads. They 
all look tired and travel-stained. Their clothes and 
their bare feet are powdered with dust. We stop 
and ask them where they are going? 

“To Pandhari, of course,” they reply, and their 
weary faces light up. They have been on the road 
for a fortnight, covering something like fifteen 
miles a day, and they have still a hundred miles to 
go. 
A little farther on we see a strange figure mak- 
ing unaccountable contortions and flapping up and 
down. Coming nearer, we discover a man lying 
full length on the road. His outstretched hands 
carry a small stick with which he makes a mark in 
the dust. Then he rises, puts his toes to this mark, 
and once more flings himself down to measure his 
length and thus fulfill his vow. As he rises we 
note the perspiration making runnels down his 

94 


A PILGRIMAGE TO PANDHARPUR 95 


dust-covered face. He glances at us for a moment 
with strained eyes, and we ask him where he is 
going? 

“To Pandhari, of course,” he replies, and his 
grimy face beams with inner joy. For will he not 
see the great Vithoba? Will he not stand for a 
moment before his blessed image, place a garland 
of flowers on it, and come away refreshed and 
inspired? Will not Vithoba be gracious to this 
worshipper of his who has laboriously measured his 
length for a specified distance to do him honour? 
Ah, this is a small thing to do for love of the 
great Vithoba! And the lonely wayfarer prostrates 
himself with renewed abandon. 

We feel that we too must go to Pandhari where 
the mighty and love-inspiring Vithoba reigns, and 
if we, being aliens, cannot pay him a personal visit, 
we can at least see the crowds of pilgrims. 

Pandharpur, familiarly and affectionately known 
as “ Pandhari,” is a town in Western India about 
two hundred miles southeast of Bombay. In a 
great temple near the banks of the river Bhima, a 
tributary of the sacred Krishna, there is a famous 
image of the god Vithoba. It is of great age but 
unknown origin, and is believed to have been a 
plebeian local deity so popular and powerful that 
he was adroitly admitted into the aristocracy of 
the Hindu pantheon as an incarnation of Vishnu. 

Every day and all day the cult of this image is 
carried on by an army of priests and other at- 


96 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


tendants attached to the temple. He is awakened 
each morning and washed and dressed and fed, and 
he possesses a magnificent wardrobe of silk gar- 
ments and a whole treasury of priceless jewels with 
which he is decked out on special occasions. 
Hindus make pilgrimages from all parts of India, 
especially on the big-festival days in July and No- 
vember, and we had the privilege of paying a long- 
planned visit last July. 

We approached Pandharpur from beyond the 
river, and a sudden bend in the road revealed the 
broad and shallow Bhima, with the town perched 
on its opposite bank. Long before reaching the 
river we could hear the shouts and singing of the 
bathers who literally swarmed in the water. 

Some men are prancing up and down and swim- 
ming about like anybody else enjoying a good 
plunge. ‘Their wet brown skins scintillate in the 
sun, and the water they throw up in their glee falls 
back again like a spray of flashing diamonds. 

Others are standing waist-deep and telling their 
beads with rapt expressions. 

Others lap up the holy water and gulp it down 
ecstatically. 

Others are washing their hair or their clothes. 

On the sandbanks sit siren-like figures—Hindu 
women with their black locks streaming in the 
wind and their brightly-coloured saris spread out 
in long rows to dry. 

And there in the middle of the stream stands a 


A PILGRIMAGE TO PANDHARPUR 97 


man with a cloth package in his hand. He flings 
it in. The cloth opens out, and the ashes of his 
revered father are scattered on the water. The 
man devoutly prays that the Bhima may bear the 
precious remains safely to its junction with the 
sacred Krishna, and that thereby all may go well 
with his father in the life beyond and that he him- 
self may obtain merit with the gods because of 
this act of filial piety. 

As we gaze at all these strange sights and realize 
how little we really understand of the background 
of India, several boats pull forward to the bank 
and jostle and jam each other as the rival boatmen 
make a bid for our patronage. We choose a boat 
with a yellow wooden horse adorning the prow, 
and guided by this gaudy steed we safely negotiate 
the sacred waters and land on the opposite bank, 
where we find a bewildering show. 

Here are primitive versions of the Ferris wheel 
—four crude wooden cages propelled round and 
round by a hand-worked lever. The occupants sit 
cross-legged, hanging on for dear life and yelling 
with mingled fear and delight as they wobble er- 
ratically from side to side and up and down. 

Here stands a fat, complacent, well-dressed man, 
looking with stolid indifference above the heads 
of some women who, in turn, are passionately kiss- 
ing his bare feet. He must be a religious guru 
(teacher), but to unbiased observers he looks un- 
commonly worldly and well-fed. With a gesture © 


98 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


of impatience he finally shakes himself free from 
this devotees, struts off like a prideful peacock, and 
is soon lost in the crowd. 

Here is a wild-eyed “holy” man with unkempt 
locks and a loose saffron robe. He carries a saf- 
fron flag, a brass begging bowl and a string of 
elaborately carved beads—his rosary. Under his 
arm is a one-stringed harp made out of a big fruit 
like a pumpkin. 

Here is a group of three “ holy ” men of a dii- 
ferent species. They are dressed in women’s 
clothes and wear high, sugar-loaf hats made of 
peacock feathers. They are beating their kettle- 
drums and raking in the coins of the credulous. 

Farther on we catch sight of still another kind 
of “saint” standing on one leg. An admiring by- 
stander eagerly informs us that he has been in this 
position for three hours and has nine hours more 
to go to fulfill his vow. His bare right foot rests 
against his rigid left knee; his right arm is pressed 
close to his side with his rosary in his right hand ; 
while his left arm, bent at the elbow, holds a brass 
bowl slightly in front of his body. His eyes are 
fixed on the ground with a vacant expression like 
that of a person in a trance, and no movement or 
sound in the seething crowd causes him so much 
as to move an eyelid. On a little mat in front of 
him are scattered many coins which he will no 
doubt condescend to appropriate when he finishes 
his amazing balancing stunt. 


"NO GNV NO OS GNVY—MNAaVJ SIHL LV SAO], YAR, HIIM NIvOV ATaSYap] 
SALVULSOUd GNV dN Slay) NAHL “ANVS AHL NI NAVI V SANVJ IHS GNVE] WP NI MOILS FTILLIT V ALIA 





h 


8 A y ay 
eh a 


ted ee 





a 


“= 
rie 





ag 


A PILGRIMAGE TO PANDHARPUR 99 


The flights of stone steps leading from the river 
bank to the higher level of the town itself are 
thronged with men and women and children, and 
at the edge sit several repulsive “holy” beggars 
with their bare bodies and their faces smeared with 
white ash, through which their eyes leer horribly. 
We elbow our way through the good-natured and 
friendly crowd and reach a street likewise packed 
with moving humanity. People are coming and 
going each way and keep to no rule of the road, so 
one must be quick-witted enough to dart here and 
there as opportunity offers. 

The little open shops and booths are doing a 
roaring trade, and lakhs and lakhs of rupees change 
hands. The sweetmeat shops show stacks of sticky, 
fly-beset goodies; the bookshops their gaudy pic- 
tures of Hindu gods and goddesses; and the cloth 
shops their piles of brightly coloured wares, while 
from every possible and impossible point of van- 
tage hang the most startling little frocks and bon- 
nets for babies. The frocks that are supposed to 
be in “ Europe” style are nerve-racking creations 
of crude green or red or yellow or purple silk 
trimmed with tawdry tinsel and quantities of cheap 
cotton lace that would give any white baby con- 
vulsions, but Indian mothers love to dress up their 
little brownies in them, and fondly suppose them 
to be the last word in “ Europe” elegance. There 
is also a brisk business in rosaries of tulsi wood— 
tulsi being the sweet balsam, sacred in India, of 


100 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


which a plant often grows at the door of orthodox 
Hindu houses. 

The strolling pedestrians suddenly subside into 
the smallest possible space by the side of the road, 
as a frenzied khaki-clad policeman appears on the 
scene, brandishing his baton and trying to make 
room for a noisy procession approaching down the 
narrow street. It consists of a fife-and-drum band 
and a number of banners of purple silk bearing the 
form of the monkey god embroidered in gold 
thread. For, although Vithoba is the goal of every 
pilgrim, folks are still catholic or, perhaps, prudent 
enough to let their surplus devotion include lesser 
lights; so at Vithoba’s great festivals many sub- 
sidiary gods and goddesses come in for a share of 
attention, both material and spiritual. As we pass 
a small shrine by the roadside we see a man at the 
entrance make a profound obeisance to the figure 
of Ganpati, the jolly, elephant-headed god. Here 
again, at a street corner, stand a number of sacred 
cows. An old woman comes up, gives the attendant 
a pice (half a cent), and is allowed to perform an 
act of worship by touching first a cow and then 
her own breast. 

It is slow work to make any headway through 
the seething masses, but finally we reach the im- 
mense temple which houses that simple figure, three 
feet nine inches high, carved out of the trap rock, 
which draws unto itself the ardent devotion of 
millions of Hindus. By the temple gate large bam- 


A PILGRIMAGE TO PANDHARPUR 101 


boo enclosures have been erected, and in these we 
see women herded together just like cattle in a pen 
but with far less room. Yet they all seem satisfied 
with life as they squat in tightly packed rows on 
the ground, gossiping or dozing or watching for 
the signal that it is now their turn to be admitted. 

A courteous police-officer, himself a Hindu, takes 
us by a private staircase to the roof of the temple. 
From here we can see down into a spacious court- 
yard where five hundred men are waiting to visit 
Vithoba. The officer explains that the pilgrims are 
admitted in batches of five hundred—men and 
women alternately. Each such group is allowed 
just half an hour, so that during the twenty-four 
hours of the auspicious day only about 20,000 out 
of the 300,000 pilgrims attain their heart’s desire; 
and each of these lucky ones gets only five seconds 
actually at the shrine. 

No untouchables are allowed into the temple, so 
we know that these five hundred men beneath us 
are all of good caste. There are many Brahmans, 
but the great majority are Marathas, the sturdy 
but backward farmer class of Western India. 
They are mostly dressed in white, and their red 
turbans make vivid splashes, with here a lilac spot 
and there a brilliant yellow one. It would be diffi- 
cult to picture five hundred able-bodied white men 
content to squat on a stone floor, with no room to 
move round and with nothing to do, for hours at 
atime. But these are Easterners, proficient in the 


102 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


gentle art of killing time, and they look patient and 
happy, with an air of subdued expectancy. Each 
one carries a string of fresh flowers to throw to 
Vithoba, and flower-sellers walk up and down try- 
ing to tempt them to buy bigger and more ex- 
pensive garlands of roses and jasmine. The heavy 
fragrance floats up to us on the balcony. 

some of the men doze as they sit huddled up 
with their arms round their knees. A number of 
young boys lie full-length and sound asleep between 
the rows of sitters. 

But now comes the signal for this particular 
batch to be admitted. They rise and stretch them- 
selves with an air of relief, hold their pathetic little 
offerings of flowers in readiness, and follow each 
other in single file and in perfect order out of 
sight. The officer takes us to another part of the 
temple roof which is pierced by giant air-shafts. 
One of these leads down to the spot immediately in 
front of Vithoba’s image. The shrine itself was, 
of course, out of the range of our vision, but we 
could see the line of pilgrims moving towards it 
and then away from it. The worshippers natu- 
rally want to linger in front of their god and take 
more than the allotted five seconds, so two at- 
tendants are on duty to prevent any one from 
poaching on the next person’s privileges. One at- 
tendant pushes each devotee forward into the 
shrine and the other pulls him out. 

Imagine just one—two—three—four—five sec- 


A PILGRIMAGE TO PANDHARPUR = 103 


onds in which to fulfill the ambition of a lifetime, 
to say your prayers and make your vows in pres- 
ence of your deity before being forcibly hauled 
away from him! 

But a five seconds’ visit with his god by no 
means satisfies the craving for bhakti, so the de- 
vout pilgrim proceeds to a court not far from the 
shrine where there is more room. We looked down 
another shaft and what did we see? A dignified 
Brahman bows gravely towards the shrine, then 
crosses his arms, seizes the lobes of his ears with 
the opposite hands, and skips up and down and 
spins round and round until he staggers with re- 
ligious ecstasy. Then he prostrates himself on the 
stone floor and rolls over and over to one side and 
then back again. But even here there is neither 
time nor permission to loiter, so an attendant fur- 
nished with a lusty cloth whip thrashes the writh- 
ing bodies of the over-zealous until they get up and 
make room for others. 

To an outsider it seems at first like ludicrous 
child’s play, but the tragedy of it rushes over one 
and chokes back any momentary inclination to be 
amused, All that wealth of devotion lavished on 
a piece of stone graven by human _ hands! 
Thoughtful worshippers may be conscious of a god 
or a spirit back of the image, but the great, illiter- 
ate, credulous masses of India think in terms of 
the tangible object itself. 

And after the pilgrimage to their Mecca, what 


104 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


then? Well, the pilgrims invariably go back home 
tired out and penniless but usually happy and in- 
spired and determined to repeat the experience, if 
possible. 

One day when we were camping in a Travellers’ 
Bungalow many miles from Pandharpur, a Mara- 
tha man hobbled on to the verandah to take shelter 
from a passing shower. He was clad in scanty 
and filthy rags and his feet were swollen and blis- 
tered. He told us he had started out with ample 
money for his railway fare to and from Pandhari, 
but, somehow or other, what with the various pil- 
grim taxes and the attractions of the shops and the 
wiles of the “ confidence”? men, and most of all 
the exorbitant demands of the pious priests, he 
had been left without a cent. In fact, the only 
thing he had brought back with him, the only 
thing he had got for nothing was this 
and he fumbled clumsily to locate his ragged pocket 
and at last produced . . . a Christian tract! 
A white lady had given it to him one day in the 
streets of Pandharpur. He couldn’t read it, of 
course. Oh, no, he was just a poor ignorant man, 
but away off in his village, the young son of the 
headman had been to school and could read and 
write, and some night he would ask him to read 
this story to him, and then he would know all 
about it. 

To witness a crowd of devotees on a festival day 
is to become acutely aware of great spiritual and 


A PILGRIMAGE TO PANDHARPUR = 105 


emotional forces both individual and national 
which, so far, have hardly felt the impact of so- 
called Western civilization or culture. To direct 
these forces into healthy and useful channels, to 
keep them untarnished by materialistic influences, 
and to give the great, hungry heart of India an 
adequate and a noble outlet for her overflowing 
instincts for devotion—these are some of the vital 
problems that lie before her statesmen, her patriots 
and her reformers. 


Vill 
THROUGH THE DEEP WATERS 


XCITEMENT ? (Lots of it... ol hriligy 
kK Heaps of them. Our biggest thriller? The 
rich man going through the deep waters. 

Night after night, in a secluded spot in our se- 
cluded garden, you could have seen a quaint trio 
sitting round a table with a couple of books and 
alamp. A middle-aged man, stolid and seemingly 
imperturbable, squats on a chair with his legs 
drawn up under him. His bright pink turban is 
laid on the ground beside him, and his one lock 
of hair, pendent from the very centre of his head, 
streams in each occasional breath of wind. A lit- 
tle silver box at his waist, hung on a silver chain 
which passes over his right shoulder and under his 
left arm, scintillates as it comes within the tiny 
circle of light. 

Opposite him sits a bright-faced youth, his very 
black skin contrasting with his sparkling white 
teeth and spotless white turban as he smiles and 
nods in acquiescence to what he hears. 

The third member of the group is a white 
woman trying to give some glimmerings of a re- 
ligion of freedom and brotherhood to these two en- 
quirers who, like Nicodemus of old, prefer the 
privacy of the kindly night. 

106 


THROUGH THE DEEP WATERS 107 


Bapurao (Bah-poo-row, equivalent to Mr. 
Bapu) was a well-to-do merchant in Barispoor, by 
birth a Wani—of a large and influential trading 
community, and by religion a Lingayet. The lit- 
tle silver box which we noticed contains his god 
—a pear-shaped piece of stone. This was given to 
him at the initiation ceremony when he passed 
from childhood to manhood. He wears it day and 
night, and every morning he takes it out, bathes 
and worships it, and puts it back again. 

Bapurao had property in Barispoor and a grain- 
shop. Two of his customers aroused his curi- 
osity—modest and well-mannered women who al- 
ways paid for their grain instead of running up 
an account as most other folks did. He found that 
they were the mother and the wife of the Christian 
pastor, a particularly fine man of outcaste origin 
but well-educated and cultured and the friend and 
confidante of both caste and outcaste. Bapurao 
knew nothing whatever about this new-fangled re- 
ligion called Christianity, except that white stran- 
gers brought it from overseas and taught it to the 
lowly and unspeakable outcastes. It could, of 
course, have no meaning for him—a rich trades- 
man and a Lingayet; but he became very fond of 
the pastor and had long talks with him, and 
strange thoughts would flit through his mind as he 
listened to revolutionary ideas of a God who was 
not to be feared but loved; who considered all men 
his children, thus making them brothers of one 


108 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


family; and who needed neither tangible image in 
the temple nor red-painted stone by the wayside 
nor pear-shaped stone in its silver box to visualize 
him to his worshippers. 

When Bapurao’s wife died, he was seized by a 
sudden impulse to join the ranks of the Christians. 
So he asked to be received and to be given a Chris- 
tian wife. But he stipulated that the wife must be 
of Wani origin. Now, Wani converts are almost 
nil, so we wrote round in frantic haste to numerous 
mission stations. After about three months we 
heard of a suitable girl, so sent for Bapurao and 
told him the good news. He received it without 
enthusiasm and with evident embarrassment. 
Presently we elicited the astounding fact that he 
had yielded to family pressure and had already 
been married for two months to a woman of his 
own caste. And he had been afraid to tell us in 
case we would be angry! 

You can imagine our consternation and disap- 
pointment. It seemed dreadful to lose this good 
man just because of unavoidable delay in finding a 
suitable bride. To our limited vision all hope 
seemed gone. Bapurao remained friendly but 
avoided all mention of religion and seemed to have 
settled down resignedly in the old ways. 

But the good Lord can bring things to pass in 
His own wise way and remove obstacles in His 
own good time! Within a year Bapurao’s second 
wife died! He soon appeared at the bungalow 


THROUGH THE DEEP WATERS 109 


and asked to be received into Christian fellowship. 
We were convinced of his sincerity and agreed to 
have the ceremony in secret because he anticipated 
trouble from his caste. 

We experienced that night one of the thrills that 
all too seldom fall to a missionary’s lot—the ad- 
mission of a rich, high-caste man into the ranks 
of the despised Christians. Never had the tre- 
mendous character of the step struck me so for- 
cibly as when this middle-aged idol-worshipper 
stood up and confessed Christ, and then, removing 
his coat and shirt, took from the chain at his waist 
the silver box containing the god he had wor- 
shipped for thirty years and which he had always 
considered his most precious possession. He 
_ handed it to the white sahib and then was bap- 
tised. A few solemn words cut him off from the 
customs and associations of his whole life, and 
identified him with a community of people whom 
his caste laws had taught him to despise and avoid. 
Then the missionary took a big pair of scissors 
and cut off the one lone strand of hair which all 
orthodox Hindus wear. After the service was 
over, Bapurao shook hands with his new friends 
and went off—for the first time in his mature life 
without his little stone god, which lay, prostrate 
with chagrin and indignation, beside the hair-lock 
on Bill’s desk. 

But this turned out to be only the beginning of 
the story. Next morning Bapurao came back and 


110 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


asked for a wife. He had progressed in the 
ideals of his new faith, for he made no stipulation 
as to her origin. The main thing was to get fixed 
up soon. We therefore suggested Gitabai (Gee- 
ta-bye, equivalent to Miss Gita), a young and | 
sprightly Bible woman of outcaste origin, a widow 
with one child. Bapurao liked the idea and asked 
us to broach the matter. I did so, and I was cer- 
tain by her expressionless face that the suggestion 
appealed to her immensely, but she asked a night 
to think it over. I found afterwards that she had 
written that very afternoon to her relatives and had 
told them that she was going to marry Bapurao 
whether they agreed or not! 

On the following Monday when we came down 
from the sleeping-porch we found Bapurao waiting 
for us in a very agitated frame of mind. He said 
the Wanis were after him and that he must take 
refuge here. Without so much as waiting for per- 
mission he slipped past us into Bill’s office and hid 
there for the rest of the day. 

The crowds began to swarm round the bunga- 
low. We closed up the doors and windows. ‘The 
leaders of the Wani community demanded to see 
Bapurao and declared that we were keeping him by 
force. We tried to persuade him to come out for 
a moment and assure his friends that everything 
had been done of his own free will. But he re- 
fused to budge. He knew their tricks, he said. 
The moment he would put his nose outside the 


THROUGH THE DEEP WATERS i111 


bungalow they would rush him and carry him off 
and make away with him in some way—possibly 
by undetectable poison. ‘They then sent in all sorts 
of tempting messages—that his little stepson 
wanted to see him for a moment, that a favourite 
little girl was crying for him, etc. But Bapurao 
was adamant. Not only so, but he begged us to 
fetch Gitabai and have the wedding immediately, 
as it is much more difficult to take a man back into 
his caste if he has married an outcaste. 

Bill rushed down on his bicycle to Gitabai’s 
house, found she was willing to play up, and asked 
her to stroll up casually to the bungalow, as she did 
nearly every day. She did so, and we called ina 
few trustworthy Christians. We saw that the 
bungalow was securely fastened and we gathered 
in the guest-room, the most secluded room in the 
house, having taken the precaution to hang a dark 
curtain across the window. 

Gitabai, whose monthly salary had been three 
dollars, wore a wedding sari that cost fifty dollars! 
It was a gorgeous purple silk affair with a heavy 
border of gold embroidery; and with this she wore 
a brick-coloured shawl which at least assured the 
outward gaiety of the ceremony. Our hearts were 
heavy with apprehension, for through the dark cur- 
tain we could indistinctly see figures prowling 
round the bungalow, and we wondered what 
would happen if they guessed what was going on 
inside. 


112 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


When Bapurao and Gitabai were pronounced 
man and wife, the bridegroom went back and hid 
in Bill’s office while the bride went down to her 
house to pack. How we were ever to get them out 
of Barispoor was a problem, for Bapurao abso- 
lutely refused to go by train, even under Bill’s pro- 
tection. He felt sure he would be overpowered 
and carried off. 

More and more people came and patrolled the 
bungalow and compound, some of them genuinely 
distressed at this fall from grace, some merely curi- 
ous, and a few decidedly hostile. They insisted 
that we were imprisoning their man against his 
will, so at last he agreed to talk with two of the 
most influential leaders of the Wani community, 
provided Bill stayed close at hand. First came a 
wealthy merchant. He sat in the guest-room while 
Bapurao continued to crouch in the adjoining of- 
fice, and Bill took up his position in the open door 
between the two rooms. ‘The visitor burst into 
tears and begged Bapurao not to bring such dis- 
grace on his friends and fellow-caste men. Then 
he turned to Bill and said, “ Sahib, don’t take away 
this good man from us. He’s one of our very 
best. If only you'll let him go, I’ll promise you 
ten less important men!” Bill explained that we 
didn’t want “ten less important men” and that it 
was a matter in which he himself had merely been 
an instrument—a matter which lay between Ba- 
purao and his new God. After much useless weep- 


THROUGH THE DEEP WATERS 113 


ing and storming this visitor went away sorrow- 
fully. 

Then another friend came in, and immediately 
offered Bapurao five thousand rupees in cash and 
all the expenses of a big purification ceremony if 
only he would recant. But Bapurao merely shook 
his head and repeated over and over again “ The 
step which is taken, is taken!” ‘This meant that 
he had burned his boats. 

When the crowds waiting to hear the verdict 
were informed that Bapurao stuck to his choice 
and that there was nothing doing, they began to cut 
up rough. ‘Things looked ugly. It was a critical 
moment when Bill stepped out of the bungalow, 
addressed the hostile crowd, assured them that 
there was nothing more to be said or done, and 
requested them kindly to leave. As he spoke, he 
gently but firmly propelled them towards the gar- 
den gate, stood aside till the last one passed 
through, and then closed it and came back. To 
this day, I marvel there was no violence! If one 
stone had been thrown when he turned back to- 
wards the bungalow, we would have been in for a 
first-class riot. I presume that his coolness had 
taken them by surprise. 

After much anxious cogitation we concocted a 
plan for getting the happy (?) couple out of Baris- 
poor. The bride took the evening train to the 
junction twenty-two miles down the line. Bapurao 
remained in the office. We ourselves went up to the 


114 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


sleeping-porch as usual. Then, at two in the morn- 
ing, when there was fine moonlight, Bill slipped 
along and fetched Redbird, the motorcycle. We 
had figured it all out that Redbird could not pos- 
sibly get out of town without making a good lot of 
noise, and that there surely would be watchers who 
might attack it if they thought Bapurao was in the 
side-car. On the other hand, they would not mind 
it if Bill and I ran away at dead of night. They 
would simply come to the bungalow and “ rescue”’ 
their friend. The main point, therefore, was to 
make them think that it was I in the side-car. So 
I fetched my big sun-hat and a green veil, and 
dressed up our stout and dusky friend to look 
like me! 

My sensations are indescribable as I watched, 
from the verandah upstairs, the start of the little 
cavalcade. Bill, accompanied by the ludicrously- 
disguised Bapurao and by a man with a lantern, 
walked Redbird to the fork of the roads in front of 
the house, seated the runaway in the rickety old 
side-car, and started up the engine. How it roared 
and reverberated in the still night, as though on 
purpose to warn the entire population of the clan- 
destine flight! And then, in his excitement, if Bill 
didn’t stall the engine! I could have screamed. 

At last they were off, and I watched the indis- 
tinct blur through the trees, and strained my ears 
to hear whether the engine suddenly stopped— 
which would probably mean an attack. But our op- 


THROUGH THE DEEP WATERS 115 


ponents had evidently been literally caught napping, 
for the chug-chug died steadily down in the dis- 
tance, and I turned in to an anxious vigil, ardently 
wondering what might be in store for me—left un- 
protected in the bungalow with the probability that 
the Wanis might come in search of Bapurao. 

I must have fallen into a restless doze, for about 
six in the morning I was awakened by loud shout- 
ing near by. All the events of the previous day 
rushed over me, and I got up and flew to the porch 
window. ‘There on the main road, half hidden by 
the trees, was an angry, gesticulating crowd of In- 
dians, and in the middle of them I could dimly see 
a man with a sun-hat, and part of a cycle wheel. 
“ Poor Bill!” thought I, “ they’ve waylaid him on 
the way back. I must get help.” 

I ran to the side-window, flung it open, and hol- 
lered for the watchman. 

“ What on earth’s the matter, Betty?” asked a 
sleepy voice behind me. 

I jumped round. ‘There lay Bill, safe and sound 
under his mosquito net! 

ROW Dalai cau. wVVliere ry es tee Vili 
Oh, how did you get here? ” I gasped. 

“ Oh, easy enough. I had a non-stop run to the 
junction, gave the bridegroom over into the blush- 
ing bride’s care, and scuttled back to bed before 
Barispoor was awake—or you! ” 3 

And we discovered later that the poor man with 
the sun-hat and the cycle was a mill-clerk sur- 


116 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


rounded by a crowd of angry mill-strikers agitating 
for a raise in wages. 


But we must cut Bapurao’s long story short, al- 
though his troubles were by no means over. He 
and Gitabai stayed for some time in a neighbouring 
town, and then ventured back to Barispoor while 
we were away. With absolute heroism they stayed 
in Bapurao’s old house, right in the Want quarter, 
but his friends and relatives beat and kicked Gita- 
bai, tore the cooking vessels out of her hand and 
threw them away, and did everything they could to 
make life impossible. The courageous Gitabai 
stuck it out, but one morning she woke to find her 
husband gone. ‘The door and the windows were 
still fastened. A hole in the roof showed how he 
had been kidnapped. She went to her own people, 
and for months had no word as to whether her 
husband were dead or alive. And during that 
nightmare of a time she had a little still-born son. 
Then one day Bapurao appeared, pale and thin and 
in rags. He had run away from his captors, 
walked thirty miles to the railway, and borrowed 
money for a ticket. 

By and by things began to calm down. But 
Bapurao was not happy. Although he had lost 
money and property, he still had enough to live on, 
but he had no occupation, and he would sit all day 
and brood on what he had suffered. He was too 
old and too little educated to make him either a 


THROUGH THE DEEP WATERS 117 


teacher or a preacher. His whole life and experi- 
ence had been with grain and other commodities. 
So he started up a shop in another town, but the 
Wanis were warned against him, and he was boy- 
cotted and threatened. 

And then, a strange turn of Fortune’s wheel in- 
stalled him as purchasing agent in a Christian 
boys’ boarding school. With his thirty years’ pro- 
ficiency in the arts of buying and selling, he now 
caters for a family of eighty boys, getting at cheap 
rates excellent qualities of grain and spices and 
clarified butter and solidified treacle, and all the 
other queer ingredients that go into an Indian 
menu. And the still sprightly Gitabai is matron, 
and mothers the eighty boys and makes them stand 
round too, for Bapurao is too gentle to be a dis- 
ciplinarian. They have no children of their own, 
but have adopted Gitabai’s little nephew. When 
Bapurao comes back from the bazaar each day, it 
is a treat to see the little fellow run up to him and 
feel in all his pockets for the inevitable baksheesh 
—hiscuit or candy or toy. And Bapurao’s stolid 
old face lights up in a thousand kind and happy 
wrinkles. 

Yes, Bapurao has accomplished that which 
Christ said was harder than for a camel to go 
through the eye of a needle. He, a rich man, has 
indeed entered the kingdom of God. But to reach 
it he had to go through the deep waters. Now he 
is safe on solid ground. And I think he is the 


118 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


happiest man in the Christian community. Not 
only so, but his contented face and his simple faith 
are a benediction to the people among whom he 
dwells. 


TX 
FAMINE, DISEASE, AND DEATH 


h | O wonder the Indian is fatalistic. Human 
life is so cheap, so uncertain; and the 
gods are so whimsical. ‘To-day, a man 

is alive and well; to-morrow, he is suddenly cut off, 

and by nightfall all that remains of him is a hand- 
ful of ashes. A baby’s life suddenly snuffs out 
without apparent cause; but what of that? Half 
the babies born in India die before they are a year 
old. And what can be done about it? Nothing. 

If it be the will of the gods that a man should die, 

then die he must, whether he takes medicine-water 

or not. Disease and death are nasheeb, and noth- 
ing can avert them. 

The autumn of 1918 was a nightmare to every 
one of us who lived through it in Western India. 
The usual rains having failed, the first crops like- 
wise failed. The price of grain rose to figures 
unheard of previously, even in the worst famines. 
The measure in use is the seer—roughly two 
pounds—though it varies in different parts of the 
country. Thirty years ago grain was sold at thirty 
seers to the rupee. A few years ago it fell to ten. 
War conditions in 1917 reduced it to five, and in 
1918 it actually fell to one and three-quarters! 


The result was wide-spread starvation. 
119 


120 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


The poor who, in normal times, have no extras 
that they can cut out in times of scarcity, simply 
went underfed, and the great majority of our In- 
dian Christians belonged to this category. They 
have no margin even in the best of times, so when 
prices rise they have to reduce the irreducible. 
Everywhere we saw sunken cheeks, protruding 
bones, and a famished, yearning look in the eyes. 
Grain riots took place in several towns, aged folks 
died of starvation, and babies and young children 
were sold for a song. 

Then, in the midst of this want, disease broke 
out and found easy victims in the great army of 
the underfed. Cholera and plague are familiar 
visitants, but an enemy deadlier than either of 
these made his appearance. Six million people 
died of influenza in India—which was two per cent. 
of the total population and just half the number 
that died from the same cause in the great round 
world. Young and old, rich and poor, caste and 
outcaste, Hindu and Mohammedan and Christian 
—all fell to the sickle of the implacable Harvester. 
And a great inarticulate cry went up to the brazen 
sky that persisted in looking down with cloudless 
callousness: 


“ And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, 
Whereunder crawling, cooped we live and die, 
Lift not thy hands to 1T for help—for It 
As impotently moves as you or I.” 


FAMINE, DISEASE, AND DEATH 121 


In Barispoor influenza took a deadly toll. Out 
cf a population of less than twenty thousand it 
claimed fifty per day, so that if it had continued at 
this rate the inhabitants would have been wiped out 
in about thirteen months. ‘The Wanis, a small but 
rich and influential community of merchants, bury 
their dead; and as their cemetery lay beyond our 
bungalow, we saw all the funeral processions go 
past. In influenza time there were as many as 
seven a day. Gruelling as the sight was, it held a 
fascination for us that made us go out on to the 
verandah whenever we heard, far off, the melan- 
choly tum-tum of the drums; for at their funerals, 
the Wanis use a haunting march produced by one 
big drum and a couple of kettle-drums beaten in a 
peculiar rhythm. First come the drummers and 
cymbal-players, and then the Wani priest in gaudy 
garments, and with his face hideously smeared 
with white ash. Behind him walk four men bear- 
ing on their shoulders a couple of bamboos to 
which is tied a chair-like frame. And on this 
frame sits . . . the corpse! 

He is cross-legged, with his hands folded on his 
knees; and his head is tied to the back of the frame 
and thus kept steady. Above him waves a gay 
bunch of plantain leaves—a ruse, they say, to de- 
ceive any evil spirits that may be prowling round, 
and make them think the corpse is a live man car- 
ried in honour shoulder-high by his friends. Next 
comes a motley crowd of his acquaintances and 


122 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


fellow-caste men, talking and laughing. About 
fifty yards still farther in the rear come the women, 
shrieking and wailing and beating their breasts. 
The chief mourner—wife or mother as the case 
may be—ought, if she is loyal and on to her job, 
to be so prostrate with grief that she can only stag- 
ger along with the support of her friends. The 
Want grave is a niche reached by a three-feet shaft, 
and in this the corpse is placed in a sitting attitude. 
I never could pass the Wani cemetery without im- 
agining the sight that would meet my eyes if a slice 
of earth three feet deep could be suddenly cut off 
and thus reveal a field closely packed with dead 
Wanis, each sitting cross-legged and contemplative 
in his niche like a stone Buddha. 

But most Hindus burn their dead, and at the 
burning ghat which is in two sections—for the 
Brahmans and the non-Brahmans respectively— 
we have counted as many as eight funeral pyres 
blazing simultaneously. We often met in the 
streets a procession of men jostling along with a 
crude bier. The recumbent figure would be cov- 
ered with a red cloth and sometimes sprinkled with 
flowers and coloured powder; and the dead face, 
ghastly with white ash, would loll from side to side 
distressingly. At the burning ghat the body is laid 
on a low pile of logs, and the nearest relative puts 
rice and water to the dead lips. More logs and 
fuel-cakes are piled on and round about. ‘The 
priest mutters some incantations and then sprinkles 


FAMINE, DISEASE, AND DEATH 123 


the whole pyre with kerosene oil, and applies a 
torch. ‘The flames leap up as if in triumph, and 
when the fire begins to burn steadily the mourners 
move off. It will smoulder for many hours. 

Right throughout that dreadful year we lived in 
an atmosphere of famine and disease and death and 
burial. We did not have to watch the Wani fu- 
nerals or go to the burning ghats to know that 
death was all about us. We had it at our very 
doors and in our very compound. Marathas fre- 
quently got permission to burn their dead right in 
their own fields instead of at the ghats; thus we 
actually could smell burning flesh and see flickering 
funeral fires from our bungalow roof! We had to 
keep tight hold of our nerves during that trying 
autumn and winter, and it is a marvel that we kept 
both our physical and our mental health; for we 
were constantly going into insanitary homes, nurs- 
ing influenza patients, and attending the funerals 
of both Christian and Hindu friends. 


The great problem facing every missionary in 
famine-time is to save life and relieve want without 
pauperizing anybody. In some destitute cases 
there was nothing for it but to give food or cash, 
especially to old folks or any who were sick; 
but no able-bodied man, woman or child got any- 
thing at all without working for it. But we did 
help a lot by giving clothing. When people could 
earn only enough to buy a couple of flat breads per 


124 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


day, you can imagine the state of their wardrobes. 
A generous check from America was transformed 
into a pile of clothes, and we had a great deal of 
pleasure in giving people back their self-respect. 
One Saturday evening, for instance, we sent for 
some poor folks whom we had been hoping to help 
for some time—a widow with four young children 
and no income, who just picked up a day’s work 
when and where she could get it; a young couple 
with two babies living on ten cents a day, a family 
of five living on sixteen centsaday. ‘The incredu- 
lous delight on their faces was a treat, for we had 
kept the coming gifts secret, and not one of these 
recipients had been begging for clothes—a distinct 
recommendation to a missionary harassed day and 
night by petitions for gifts deserved and otherwise. 
We said we must see how the new clothes 
looked, so the ladies retired to the south of the 
bungalow and the gentlemen to the north, and we 
heard suppressed chuckles and giggles from the 
garden during the delicious process of exchanging 
filthy rags for fresh new wrappings. ‘Then they 
filed back. What a transformation, both of face 
and figure! I never realized so forcibly before the 
tremendous psychological effect*of clothes; and I 
defy most folks, even poor, ignorant Indian out- 
castes, to be at their best spiritually when covered 
with dirty tatters. After the exhibition of fineries 
we had a short service of thanksgiving. The 
donor’s photograph was admired with many ohs 


FAMINE, DISEASE, AND DEATH 125 


and ahs. When we had finished, as we thought, a 
very old fellow said he would like to pray. He 
stood up with much rustling of his new possessions, 
bared his head, proceeded to thank God for His 
mercies and to call down blessings on the kind 
donor and also on us for our instrumentality. 
Then emotion got the better of him, and the tears 
coursed down his ancient cheeks while his quavery 
old voice rose higher and higher into a wail of 
gratitude. 

We had a row of “ sparrows” on the verandah 
every day—beaming, bright-eyed youngsters who 
came at the school interval for a flat cake of bread 
with an occasional treat in the shape of nuts or 
meat or pudding from our own table. No left- 
overs have any chance in a missionary’s home, es- 
pecially in famine time! It was just quaint to see 
my “sparrows” squatting in a row tucking into 
their eats and protecting them, with squeals of de- 
light, from the predatory puppy. 


One day I went along to the mill to nurse a poor 
Christian woman, and after attending to her I was 
asked to step into the next house to see a sick 
Hindu man. He was frightfully ill and in delir- 
ium, so I hurried back to Barispoor and fetched the 
best doctor available—who, although an unquali- 
fied man, was very clever and kept a good stock of 
medicines. 

The doctor examined the patient, left some medi- 





i - a i a a ; 
ae as yee deat 
oe o~ ‘ : os j Pass 
+ “4 ¥ =<} 
‘ J 
Pa Ve 


FAMINE, DISEASE, AND DEATH 127 


“Sahib, mudumsahib,” she panted, “there’s a 
sick man lying by the roadside, just beyond the 
bungalow. I think he’s dying.” 

Bill jumped up and ran out with his water-bottle 
and a stimulant, while I rushed to the back of the 
bungalow and sent the bullock-cart after him. He 
found the stranger unconscious, so lifted him into 
the cart and brought him to a room in the com- 
pound. He was obviously far gone, but we 
applied what simple remedies we had, and sent for 
the doctor. 3 

The poor fellow sank rapidly, and tried hard to 
say something. We bent over him and strained 
our ears, hoping to find out who he was and per- 
haps get some message for his relatives. But the 
dying man, in his delirium, was only asking for a 
cigarette! It was pathetic to see him draw his last 
breath—a stranger among strangers. But there 
was no clue to his identity except his name “ Gan- 
pat W.” sewed in crude embroidery on his little 
cloth bag. 

We sent over and informed the police, and re- 
ceived a thoroughly characteristic reply. “ Who is 
the man? What disease did he die of ? Why is 
he in your compound? What are we todo? What 
is your wish in the matter?”’ We replied that we 
wanted them to do their duty and take charge of 
the case. Finally they sent two policemen to guard 
the body as it et in a little room back of the 
bungalow. 


128 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


All through the night we could hear the rever- 
berating tom-tom of the big drum that was beaten 
through the streets in token that an unknown man 
had died. But no one turned up to make enquiries 
or to claim our stranger; so the police held an in- 
quest next morning and we handed over to them 
the dead man’s meagre little possessions—his ear- 
ring with two imitation pearls, his copper charm 
from his neck, a brass bowl, and the black cloth 
bag containing a lime-box, a nut cracker, some 
pieces of betel-nut, and a few coins. 

When the bearers were returning from the 
burial they met an old man, a stranger who had 
just stepped off the train. He asked them who 
had been buried. 

“A stranger,” they replied, “a Maratha.” 

“A young man of about twenty-five? Don’t tell 
me it was.” 

Siwes old mani 

“My son, my son,” he wailed. “It must have 
been my son. Show me his things.” 

They took him to the police-station and he rec- 
ognized his son Ganpat’s belongings. ‘Then they 
brought him to us to hear all the details we could 
give him—not very many. Poor old fellow! 
Flow he mourned! He sobbed out the story—how 
the family crops had failed for want of the rain, 
and how Ganpat had gone down to Bombay to try 
and find work. But word came that he was ill 
with influenza, so his old father scraped together 


FAMINE, DISEASE, AND DEATH 129 


enough money to bring him home, and went down 
to Bombay for him. But at that very time the sick 
Ganpat had been seized with a desire to die in his 
own village and had started out from Bombay. 
His train and his father’s must have crossed some- 
where—like Evangeline’s canoe and that of her 
lover Basil. On reaching Bombay, the father 
learned that Ganpat had gone, so hurried after 
him, only to meet on the street the men who had 
buried his boy—buried him as a stranger. Ganpat 
had evidently got off the train the previous morn- 
ing and had been trying to walk to his village when 
he collapsed near our bungalow. 

Our hearts ached with futile sympathy for the 
stricken father as he went off, beating his breast 
and wailing for his beloved son, as of old, David 
mourned for Absalom. 


Back of our bungalow was a group of ten houses 
with a patil—headman. He was a Maratha and 
was very friendly with us. When he took in- 
fluenza his mother sent for us. We passed 
through his yard, filled with tethered animals and 
sprawling babies and yelping pariah dogs. ‘The 
door was cautiously opened, revealing nothing but 
a huge cloth stretched from wall to wall. 

“Where is the patil?” I asked in amazement. 

With much ceremony and with obvious hesita- 
tion on the part of the old grandmother, a corner 
of the cloth was lifted and, by peering under a 


130 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


baby’s swing cot, I dimly perceived a form huddled 
against the wall. Crawling on hands and knees I 
reached the patil’s hand, found he had high fever, 
and called for cold water. With much grunting 
and grumbling his grandmother fetched some in 
a brass vessel, and I applied a wet cloth to his 
brow. To do this, I had to push back his huge tur- 
ban. (Imagine lying ill with fever and having ten 
yards of yard-wide cloth wrapped round your ach- 
ing head!) ‘The grandmother snorted with indig- 
nation, and the moment I removed the compress 
she officiously readjusted the turban. 

I then suggested that the curtain be taken down 
and the sick man moved out near the door where 
he might get some fresh air. But this was too 
much for the old lady. She could contain herself 
no longer. She broke out into vigorous invective. 
To think of suggesting fresh air when the poor 
fellow was ill . . . when he had high fever 
‘ . when he ought to be kept warm and out 
of the wind! What was I thinking of? What did 
I mean? Fortunately the patil sided with me and 
ordered the curtain to be taken down; but I knew 
perfectly well that the minute my back was turned 
it would go up again. Then I was asked to look 
at the sick baby, and had again to crouch under the 
cot and crawl towards another corner of this suffo- 
cating hole. I did all I could to persuade them to 
get a doctor. ‘They shook their heads. ‘This was 
nasheed, 


FAMINE, DISEASE, AND DEATH 131 


A few days later Bill and I went out for a stroll 
in the evening to try and get rid of the cobwebs of 
depression. On the way home we took a short 
cut through the patil’s fields back of our house. 
On the edge of one field there was a fire of straw 
and leaves—as we thought at the distance—burn- 
ing up brightly in rivalry to a particularly bright 
sunset. But on approaching it we made the grue- 
some discovery that it was the exit from this 
mundane sphere of the obstreperous old lady with 
the aversion to fresh air! 

A few days later the baby’s life snuffed out, and 
then the patil’s. Ignorance and prejudice had done 
their work, and in that household of ten people, 
seven died. Out of respect we went to the patil’s 
funeral which was held at night by the light of a 
big gas-lamp. We sat on the grass a little way off, 
and a man stepped forward and politely suggested 
that we might get our clothes soiled, as we were 
sitting on the very spot where a body had been 
burned the previous night! | 

On returning to the house we found the women 
wailing in a heartrending fashion; and the broken- 
hearted mother threw her arms round my neck and 
sobbed out her grief. It seemed to comfort her to 
have some one near her with a larger vision and 
with a sure belief in a life beyond where she would 
meet her loved ones. I never realized more poign- 
antly the unspeakable inspiration of that blessed 
hope in the hereafter that Christ gave us. 


Xx 
CHIEFLY ABOUT WEDDINGS 


FTER a tiring journey by train and a long 
A trek from the station, we have arrived at 
the Travellers’ Bungalow which we hope 
to make our headquarters for a long tour. The 
caretaker, an evil-faced villain, comes out and in- 
forms us that the bungalow is not inhabitable be- 
cause of a species of crawling insect—very danger- 
ous—infesting the walls. 

It does not sound inviting, but we have no other 
shelter in sight, and from the man’s attitude we 
have a shrewd suspicion that he does not want the 
bother of visitors. We vote to brave the strange 
zoological specimen and insist on his opening up 
the bungalow. We find only a few hairy cater- 
pillars sprawling over the walls! We have them 
swept down and we proceed with our unpacking 
while our faithful Krishna is busy in the cook- 
room and hustles round the grouchy caretaker to 
fetch water and wood. By the time supper is 
ready the darkness is falling, and we eat at a 
rickety table set out in front of the bungalow, 
where we can watch the gorgeous colours of the 


sunset. 
132 


CHIEFLY ABOUT WEDDINGS 1338 


In the neighbouring village plague was raging, 
and the people were fleeing to the open prairie 
where they erect shelters of iron sheets, straw, 
leaves, skins, rags, and other odds and ends, sup- 
ported on rough wooden posts or on branches of 
trees. For several months these poor refugees 
will shiver in the cold winter nights in these 
meagre huts, and only when the plague rats have 
deserted the village will they go back to! their 
houses. 

As we sat at dinner we saw the bullock-carts 
roll past on the road near the bungalow. Their 
freight was shabby and pathetic. A box with 
grain, a sack of cooking pots, a few remnants of 
clothing, and a woman and children perched on 
top of them—these were the average possessions 
of the fugitives. A thunderstorm came on, and 
flashes of lightning would suddenly illuminate the 
whole weird scene, and silhouette on a momentary 
flaming background a group of hurrying, homeless 
figures, while between the peals of thunder we 
would hear the wail of frightened infants. 

Exhausted by our long day’s journey we turned 
in for what we fondly hoped would be a restful 
night. We were rudely awakened by the rain 
streaming through innumerable cracks and cran- 
nies in the straw roof. There was not one dry 
spot in the room big enough to hold the two camp 
cots, so we beat a hasty retreat to the verandah. 
We were dry there but there was still no peace, and 


134 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


we discovered why the caretaker had been so un- 
willing to have the even tenor of his days disturbed 
—namely, he was in the habit of stabling all his live 
stock on the bungalow verandah. We were accosted 
successively by a buffalo calf, a bull, several dogs, 
and then the mother buffalo in search of her calf. 
Next we heard noises inside the bungalow, and Bill 
had to get up and rescue the carrots in our pro- 
vision basket from an army of,.rats. He had just 
got back to his cot when I heard a smothered ex- 
clamation. 

‘““What’s the matter, Bill?” I called. 

“ Oh, nothing much this time! Just a rat in my 
bed!” 


We had just broken up camp. ‘The first bullock- 
cart had started off with about half our parapher- 
nalia. Bill was helping to load the second, and 
when it had got under way he and I would follow 
on our cycles. I sat down on a camp-chair and 
had a look at a home paper. 

Just then two Indian women came along with 
enormous loads on their heads. They were Mar- 
waris—a rich trading community, and they wore 
voluminous pleated skirts (some of these skirts 
actually measure thirty yards at the hem!) and 
were laden with jewellery. They stopped and 
looked at us, first at me, then at Bill, then back at 
me, and discussed us with each other in loud tones. 
Then they blurted out, “ Look here, woman, why 


CHIEFLY ABOUT WEDDINGS _ 135 


are you sitting idle and letting your husband do all 
the work? ” 

I laughed and explained that I Aad been work- 
ing, but that it was the custorn in our country for 
the men-folks to do heavy jobs like roping boxes, 
etc. They shook their heads in disapproval. Then 
they turned to Bill. “ Sahib, why don’t you make 
her get up and work? ”’ 

Bill, who was enjoying the affair immensely, also 
explained the strange customs of white men, and 
ended up by saying, “ So, you see, I’m very glad 
to finish the packing and let my wife rest.” | 

They looked at him as if he were a poor fool. 
“ F’m,” they snorted, “ then what on earth did you 
marry her for?” 


Maruti, the monkey-god’s temple, with no win- 
dows and only one door, serves as the village 
school. Opposite the door grins the ugly stone im- 
age mouthing hideously at the pupils day by day. 

To-day, a white man sits on the verandah sur- 
rounded by squatting figures in flowing white gar- 
ments and multi-coloured turbans. The palaver 
proceeds leisurely until the crowd reaches the 
proper psychological point of interest and friendli- 
ness, when the stranger broaches the subject of the 
oppressed widow and the unjust stewards. The 
chief object in coming to this particular village is 
to enquire into a case where a widow is being 
cheated of her field by her two brothers-in-law. 


136 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


By and by the sahib draws from two unpreju- 
diced witnesses the right version of the story. He 
actually persuades one of the brothers to confess 
his dishonesty. And then—incredible develop- 
ment!—he suggests that a document be drawn up 
stating the facts. The brother and ten important 
villagers sign it. Look at them! They come one 
by one, hold out their thumb for the village teacher 
to ink it with his quill pen, and then make a great 
daub on the paper. 

Meanwhile, raucous shrieks rend the air as the 
vixenish wife of the unrepentant brother rushes out 
of her house near by and threatens all who sign. 
One old man shakes his head and then dramatic- 
ally draws down his moustaches and ears. ‘This 
throws the crowd into fits of laughter, for it sym- 
bolizes what he expects would happen to him if he 
dared to put his name to that damnatory docu- 
ment. Finally, however, he screws up his cour- 
age, and the evil-visaged woman goes off grimac- 
ing horribly and breathing out threatenings and 
slaughter. 

The missionary then gets in a good talk about 
the Master and the Master’s love of justice. ‘The 
people of that village, who had never been visited 
by any white man before, are mightily impressed 
with this strange new religion that demands dis- 
interested fair play for poor and rich alike, for 
friend and stranger alike. ‘They beg the mission- 
ary to come again and tell them more about it. 


CHIEFLY ABOUT WEDDINGS 137 


We just had time for a hurried cup of tea in 
the early morning before the crowds began to 
arrive. 

We were camping out in a Travellers’ Bungalow 
at the “ back of beyond.” ‘The nearest village was 
about half a mile away and lay on the farther side 
of a miniature valley. We could see our visitors 
in ones and twos and threes emerge from the grey 
mud walls of the village, walk down the path to 
the well in the hollow, and climb up the nearer side 
and make straight for the bungalow. Their white 
clothes and red turbans made bright patches 
against the colourless background of barren land— 
lively patches too, for they were all gesticulating 
emphatically. And as they came nearer we could 
see how determined their faces were. These were 
obviously men who were not to be trifled with, men 
who had come to see what was what and to act 
accordingly. 

They squatted on our verandah, and I knew only 
too well that we were in for a whole-day stunt— 
and a day to be lived literally in the public eye. 
Only one room in the bungalow had been avail- 
able, and this had to act as sitting-room, dining- 
room, bedroom, boudoir, office, and reception- 
room. It had two doors and two windows that 
provided excellent points of vantage from which 
our inquisitive visitors could view our every move- 
ment and all the queer stuff that the missionary 
sahib lugs round with him—clothes and bedding 


138 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


and stores and camp dishes, to say nothing of 
tools and spare wheels and other motor accessories 
that had to be stowed for safety in our one limited 
room. 

The matter in hand was not the performance 
of a wedding ceremony as we had expected it to 
be, but the question of to be or not to be. The 
bride, Limbi, had been educated by us for years; 
but two years ago, without our knowledge or con- 
sent, she had been betrothed to a poor and ignorant 
country bumpkin of sixteen, named Keru. As a 
betrothal in India is almost as sacred as marriage 
it seemed unwise to break it off, so we delayed 
the wedding until now. But all of a sudden the 
_ little bride-to-be changed her mind. She wanted 
to marry, she said, but she wanted a better match 
than Keru! ( 

I secretly sympathized with her, for Keru lives 
in a room measuring five feet by eleven, along with 
his father and two uncles and two brothers and a 
sister; and the chief reason for pushing on the 
wedding was a desire on the part of the older 
members of the family to get a “woman about 
the house” (aged fourteen!) to do the cooking 
for the entire household. However, a promise is 
a promise, and Keru was no whit poorer and his 
house no whit smaller now than two years ago 
when the match was made. 

Limbi and her foolish mother kept out of sight 
in their little house a stone’s throw away from the 


CHIEFLY ABOUT WEDDINGS _ 139 


_ bungalow, of which the mother is the caretaker. 
The people on the verandah were all the bride- 
groom’s friends and relatives. ‘They were in very 
bad humour, for a broken betrothal is a disgrace 
to the whole community. Not only so, but they 
had gone to huge expense and had made elaborate 
preparations. A cloth bundle was dumped down 
before us and opened out to display two saris, a 
jacket, a pair of silver armlets—all for Limbi; 
two new dhoters for Keru; and ten silver rupees. 
The clothes were the minimum required for any 
respectable wedding and had cost twenty rupees 
(about seven dollars). With the ten silver rupees 
in hard cash, this made an outlay of thirty rupees. 
But not a penny of this had been paid for. The 
bridegroom-elect had taken them “on tick”? from 
a rich merchant, and in return had pledged him- 
self for two years of overtime work. This goes 
one better than furnishing a house for one’s bride 
on the installment-payment plan! 

The atmosphere was tense, so we tried to re- 
lieve it by a little play-acting. I took up the silver 
armlets, showed them to sahib, bared my un- 
adorned upper arm, and reproached him with not 
having given me any silver armlets on my wedding 
day. I sulked and pouted and threatened to bake 
him no more bread till he paid up. (This is the 
Indian woman’s one weapon for getting what she 
wants out of her husband.) Sahib pretended to 
be much perturbed and repentant, and the crowd 


140 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


went into fits, for nothing amuses them more than 
when the white sahib and mudumsahib ‘act In- 
dian.” | 

Then we sat and gossiped with them and asked 
after the numerous additions to their families. 
You cannot blame us for losing count of the young 
hopefuls when some of the parents themselves lose 
count. I have often seen an Indian woman, when 
I had asked her the number of her children, begin 
and tick them off on her fingers, corrected fre- 
quently by her better half or by her neighbours 
standing by. Then our friends plied us with ques- 
tions, for all of them have relatives in our town— 
sons or sons-in-law who have gone to work in the 
cotton mills. And many of them have children in 
our boarding schools. 

Ratan’s grandmother beams when I tell her he 
has been promoted to our new Middle School and 
has got a new coat and cap as baksheesh (the first 
he has ever possessed in his twelve years of life). 

Solomon’s father, appropriately named David, 
tries to hide his pride when I tell him how well 
his boy is doing and what a talent he has for 
drawing. 

Yeshwant’s father smiles when he hears that 
Yeshwant is now as tall as the sahib. 

But now the pastor arrives, and the real busi- 
ness of the day begins. It is clear that the be- 
trothal had been a pucca one, that is, real and bind- 
ing. Everybody is agreed on that score. Now, 


CHIEFLY ABOUT WEDDINGS 141 


why has Limbi changed her mind? The pastor 
and an elderly elder and the missionary-sahib are 
deputed to go and interview her and her mother. 
They do so for an hour without result. Then I 
am called for, and spend a fruitless hour alone 
with her, trying to get to the bottom of her fathom- 
less mind. Limbi is a pretty and rather pert little 
chit with the blackest skin and the whitest teeth 
imaginable. But to-day there was no gleam of 
ivory. She was sulking, and her black lips were 
clamped together like the two halves of an ebony 
oyster shell. The one and only word she would 
utter was “ nukko.” 

Now, “nukko” is the most provoking negative 
I have so far discovered in any language. In polite 
conversation it may mean “ No, thank you”; or “I 
would rather not’”’; or “ Please don’t.” But it also 
has various shades of emphasis such as ‘‘ Nothing 
doing 734 I shall nor”, “ Not on your lite”; and 
other degrees of refusal which in our complicated 
English language need so many words to express. 
So the conversation was decidedly one-sided. 

“Will you marry Keru?” 

“ Nukko.” 

“Why don’t you want to marry him?” 

“ Nukko.” ‘ 

“Then you must go back to school with us to- 
morrow.” 

* Nukko.” 

“Then we'll send you away somewhere else.” 


142 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


“ Nukko.” 

It was a deadlock. And meanwhile the visitors 
on the other side of the verandah were getting im- 
patient; so I gave Limbi an ultimatum that she 
must either marry Keru now or come back with 
us to school the next day, and I hurried off with- 
out having time to hear another “ nukko.” 

The bridegroom’s party was furious. They de- 
nounced Limbi, denounced her mother, vowed 
they'd go to law about it. We made what we 
thought a very fair offer. We asked them to wait 
three months, and see what Limbi’s attitude would 
be then. If she still refused to marry Keru, we 
promised to buy all the wedding garments and 
ornaments. But they would not hear of it. It 
was to be now or never. If Limbi refused to play 
up now, at once, they would go right off and marry 
Keru to a Hindu girl and in Hindu style. 

There was nothing for it but to let them get 
their steam off. Their pride was hurt, and pride 
is a precious possession of the downtrodden out- 
caste. The bridegroom’s aunt let herself go and 
burst into tears, and shrieked with rage and im- 
potence as she snatched up the bundle of wedding 
clothes with a flourish of finality. They finally 
went off entirely disgruntled, and without even 
saying “Salaam” to us, for they thought we 
should have put pressure on Limbi and simply have 
married her off, whether or no. 

We asked the pastor and a husky elder to come 


CHIEFLY ABOUT WEDDINGS 143 


early the next morning and help us to get Limbi 
into the car—by force if necessary, as it would 
have been criminal, in the circumstances, to leave 
her unprotected as she was. It was now two 
o'clock, so we sat down to what should have been 
our eleven o’clock breakfast. We invited the pas- 
tor, the teacher and his wife and two children, and 
the husky elder. Accommodation and dishes alike 
were limited. The string bed and a tin trunk and 
the stone floor were all utilized for sitting on. 
Then the men-folks did business matters—sahib 
taking numerous notes about numerous things to 
be done—repairs and supplies to be looked after, 
such-and-such letters to be written to such-and- 
such officials, and so on. A respite would have 
been very welcome to me, but the teacher’s wife 
and I had to have a chat. She is a brave woman. 
She and her husband are well educated and are 
used to town life with its civilization and comfort. 
Yet they are willing, for a very small salary, to 
bury themselves in an ignorant and unlovely vil- 
lage, miles from any medical help or from Indians 
of their grade. They teach a schoo! for children 
of a dozen different castes, and they are the friends 
and advisers of every one—high caste and low caste 
alike. J think they are absolutely heroic, and I 
was just glad to have the wife pour out all her 
trials and troubles. 

This lasted till about five-thirty, and just as they 
were about to start for their home three miles 


144 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


away, the pastor decided he would go and see 
Limbi and remind her she was to leave with us 
in the morning. 

Five minutes later sahib rushes in with the most 
excited face. “‘ Guess,” says he, “‘ just guess what’s 
happened.” 

I think of snakes and scorpions and other “ ex- 
citements ”’ that we-have experienced in that very 
bungalow. “Tell me quick,’ I cry. ‘“‘ What on 
earth has happened? ”’ 

“Limbi wants to marry Keru to-morrow!” 

I simply would not believe it. But so it was. 
Limbi and her mother were standing round the 
corner, all smiles. I didn’t ask what had happened 
or why, though I felt like giving her a good shak- 
ing, and I thanked my stars, as I frequently do, 
that Fate has not cast my lot among Indian girls 
and women of Limbi’s mentality. 

We sent a special messenger post haste to the 
bridegroom’s village and fixed the wedding for 
the next morning at eight o’clock. 

And the next morning the same crowd came 
back, strolling down into the valley and up to- 
wards our bungalow again. But what a transfor- 
mation! Every one smiling, every one jolly and 
joking. The happy (?) little couple were tied up 
on the verandah—literally tied up, for a corner of 
Limbi’s sari was knotted to a corner of Keru’s 
scarf, and as they shook hands after the ceremony 
she had to follow Keru meekly round, willy-nilly. 


CHIEFLY ABOUT WEDDINGS 145 


But she didn’t mind now. ‘There were no more 
sulks, not a single “ nukko”! She was smiling and 
complacent and very conscious of the new silver 
armlets just visible above her elbows, and of the 
string of black beads tied round her neck—the In- 
dian equivalent of a wedding ring. And the two 
witnesses who signed the marriage certificate were 
the Indian pastor and the husky elder whom we 
had expected, at just about that hour of the day, 
to be lifting a struggling Limbi into our perky 
little Ford, en route for the Mission school! 

But such is life in India, and such is the way- 
ward way of an Indian maid. 

The eternal feminine, you say? Maybe. 


XI 


PAYING OUR RESPECTS TO THE 
MOTHER OR PAR GH 


‘ N Y HAT a grand and glorious little lady she 

is, just two feet high, with a shiny black 

stone face, a shimmering silk sari, a 

high gold crown, a rich nose-ring, and any amount 
of gold necklaces and garlands! 

But you had better make haste and bow down 
to her, and, of course, you have brought her an 
expensive offering. For she is the great goddess 
Ambabai who can bring rain or keep it away, who 
can send murrain on the cattle and blight on the 
crops, who can make sick folks well and well folks 
sick, who can wipe out a whole family at one fell 
stroke or make the barren woman fruitful. 

She even helped a missionary sahib to kill a deer! 
Bill and I had paid her a visit in her great temple 
at Tulsipoor, and on leaving had bought a few 
curiosities—a rosary made of tulst wood, some 
strings of shells such as “holy’’ men wear, and 
one of Ambabai’s bangles, such as Hindu women 
and children wear to bring them her favour. It 
was a little black glass bangle with yellow spots 
painted on it—the whole thing most probably made 
in Austria but mighty powerful when bought in 


faith and in the name of Ambabai, even though 
146 


PAYING OUR RESPECTS 147 


it only cost one cent. It was too small to go over 
my hand, and we had no safe place to put such a 
fragile thing, so I slipped it over the muzzle of 
the rifle as it stood upright in the car. Well, you 
would hardly believe it, but we had only driven a 
few miles from the sacred city when . . . sh! 

there went a lovely black buck sauntering 
across the road ahead of us! And within twenty 
minutes that same black buck was riding along on 
the footboard of the car, with a bullet through his 
spine. Ambabai, of course! How else can you 
account for it, seeing that the sahib had previously 
used up six good bullets and six strong expressions 
in vain! 

Ambabai is evidently worth visiting, so come 
along. She lives in a quaint town named Tulsipoor 
—the town of the Tulsi-plant, the sweet balsam, 
which is sacred in India. Tulsipoor stands on a 
strikingly beautiful and unusual plateau. After 
miles and miles of absolutely flat country, a rocky 
ridge looms into view and swells in volume until 
it dominates the whole landscape. Its rugged out- 
line, from which a graceful temple spire protrudes 
heavenwards, changes constantly as the road winds 
up the precipitous hillside. And then, as the last 
bend brings you up with a swing on to the plateau, 
you look back and see the magnificent plain lying 
three hundred feet below you, and stretching far 
away into purple depths that merge with the sky. 
It is little wonder that in this flat and barren land, 


148 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


men lifted their eyes to these arresting hills and 
thought to worship their deities from these points 
of vantage. Ardent admirers of Ambabai have, 
from generation to generation, added to her orig- 
inal modest little shrine, so that now her imposing 
temple with its numerous courtyards and numerous 
“ side-shows ” stretches away down the hillside to- 
wards the level plain? 

After traversing various narrow streets we come 
to the large main entrance and enter a large gate. 
You may go down the first few flights of steps 
with your shoes on, but now when you approach 
near the shrine proper you must take them off and 
leave them with an attendant. ‘The sun-baked 
pavement feels scorching on your stockinged soles. 
Be careful in descending this next long flight. The 
steps are very steep. They are also extremely 
slippery, partly because of the thousands of pil- 
grims that yearly pass over them in search of com- 
fort and help, and partly because of the numerous 
silver coins pounded into them and worn smooth. 
Yes, thousands of dollars’ worth of good Indian 
money—rupees and half-rupees, and four-anna bits 
and two-anna bits—finds a resting-place in the 
steps and walls of Ambabai’s temple. If you won- 
der how they are fixed in, just look over there at 
that old man squatting on the ground and chiselling 
out little hollows of different sizes to receive pro- 
spective offerings. 

And now, as you descend cautiously with your 


PAYING OUR RESPECTS 149 


hand on the shaky wooden rail, look over to the 
right and notice that high stone pillar with numer- 
our projections. It is a light pillar. On special 
days every one of those brackets is filled with oil 
and has a lighted cotton wick floating in it and 
giving out a pretty little twinkle. Then, just be- 
low the pillar is an open door in what appears to 
be merely a.white wall. Out comes an old woman 
with a brass pot of water which she pours over the 
bush of tulsi growing in a white earthen flower- 
pot on a pedestal. In she goes again and comes 
back with a flat brass plate with red and yellow 
powder which she likewise sprinkles on it, while 
her lips move in prayer. You see, she is not only 
watering the tulsi but she is worshipping it, for 
the sweet balsam is a goddess to all Indian women 
in these parts. A bush of it grows outside prac- 
tically every house, and it is a vital part of the de- 
votions of the womenfolks to tend it. 

In the courtyard below are open shops display- 
ing red and yellow powder, grainstuffs, garlands, 
fruit, pictures of various gods and goddesses. 
Then another long flight of steps leads to the really 
important temple court. In a cage-like enclosure, 
very reminiscent of wild-beast cages in the me- 
nagerie, are mysterious figures draped in white 
cloth—the wooden animals on which Ambabai oc- 
casionally goes for a ride. She is a changeable 
little lady and must have a varied repertory to 
choose from. 


150 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


And now look up at this great carved spire. 
Climb up on a neighbouring roof, if you like, and 
study the detail—the rows of elephants and horses - 
with their quaint little riders, the cross-legged gods 
in the corner turrets, the equestrian deities in the 
niches of the higher row, and the wealth of carved 
flowers and spirals and conventional designs. The 
whole mass is coloured in crude reds and blues and — 
yellows, picked out in gold. It may well be gaudy, 
for it stands directly above the holy of holies that 
contains the blessed image of the “ Mother of 
Barth: 

First walk into this pillared court, dark and very 
old. It takes a moment or two to realize that the 
pillars are elaborately carved. In one corner is a 
silver image of the god Shunker, a relative of 
Ambabai. The Hindu is uncommonly conservative 
in most things, but he takes a wide view of the 
merits of numerous gods, and he often sticks in a 
few images of other gods in the temple courts 
dedicated to some particular one, and thus saves 
time and energy by giving his lesser deities a per- 
functory obeisance en passant. In this case 
Shunker is quite secondary; so you enter a queer 
octagonal room hung with many mirrors on its 
walls in lieu of pictures, and with many large glass — 
_ globes pendent from its roof. On one side an ea- 
ger attendant will invite you to peep at the large 
wooden bedstead with rich coverings where Am- 
babai reposes at stated festivals. } 


PAYING OUR RESPECTS 151 


And ‘now for the holy of holies. Crowds are 
pressing forwards and backwards through a nar- 
row door. With some trepidation you elbow your 
way across the threshold into a small dark room 
with open oil lamps vilifying the air with smoke. 
On a high plinth stands Ambabai, so close that you 
could touch her—if you dared! Hasn’t she a kind 
of leer, or is it only the shadow falling on her 
polished black face as an ardent admirer holds a 
taper close to her, to let you have a good look at 
Her Majesty. And is there not a suspicion of a 
leer on the faces of some of the men standing 
round? “And Ambabai really helps your” you 
ask a fine, tall Brahman boy with an intellectual 
face. “Of course,” he replies. “ Who else 
would?” 

There is certainly no leer on the faces of the 
women worshippers, only reverence and adoration, 
yes, and hope. There, that young woman with 
the hunted look—surely she is an Indian Hannah 
praying her god to have pity on her because 
of the other wife’s taunts. And here comes 
another Hannah, happy in the realization of her 
hopes, come to pay her vows by dedicating her 
child to the great “ Mother of Earth.” And you 
think of little Samuel being consecrated to the 
service of the living God. And this poor child? 
Alas, she is to be given over to be “a daughter of 
Ambabai.” Now, just exactly what does that 
mean? 


152 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


We first heard of Ambabai’s daughters when 
touring up in our district. We were introduced 
to Gigibai, a fine young woman of about eighteen, 
the daughter of the caretaker of a Travellers’ 
Bungalow. With her was a young man of about 
her own age. 

“ And this is your husband, I suppose? ”’ I asked. 

“Oh, no. How could I have a husband? I am 
one of Ambabai’s daughters.” 

Being still green at that time, we were com- 
pletely mystified, so had to ask what that implied. 
It seems that Gigibai’s mother, when still a Hindu, 
took a severe swelling on her neck, and in order 
to get it cured went to Tulsipoor and promised 
Ambahai that in return for being made well she 
would dedicate her next daughter to Ambabai. 
The plan seemed to work. The swelling disap- 
peared, and not long afterwards Gigibai was born. 
Her mother immediately took her to the temple 
and dedicated her to Ambabai. 

“And that means—what?” I enquired. 

“ Oh, it means that I can never have a husband 
—a married husband, you understand. I must be 
ready to live with any man who asks me—but only 
one atatime. So you see this man that I have now 
is not my husband.” (We irresistibly thought of 
the woman of Samaria—“And he whom thou now 
hast is not thy husband.’’) 

In some trepidation I asked how many “ tem- 
porary husbands ’”’ she had had? 


f PAYING OUR RESPECTS 1538 


“Oh, this fellow is my first. He and I are fond 
of each other; so we have lived together about a 
year now.” 

You can imagine how we wished we might save 
this lovely young girl from a long succession of 
“temporary husbands.” As it happened, her fa- 
ther had become a Christian, and she herself and 
her partner were very much interested in Chris- 
tianity. We saw to it that they learned more about 
it; and a happy day came when Gigibai and her 
temporary husband both became Christians—which 
of course exonerated Gigibai from her mother’s 
hideous vow for her. ‘They were married accord- 
ing to Christian rites and are now a respectable 
couple, with two lovely children. 

And now look again at Ambabai’s sinister face. 
Don’t you feel a little triumphant since you know 
that at least one of her “daughters” has been 
stolen from her? But then the thought rushes over 
you that Gigibai was only one, out of so many 
hundreds or thousands. Do you see those jolly 
little girls dancing up and down the broad flights 
of steps? ‘These also are Ambabai’s daughters— 
but attached to the temple. They look happy and 
care-free now; but later on they will find that their 
poor misguided mothers dedicated them, in the 
name of religion, to the vilest of vocations. 

And all of a sudden the stifling air and the stench 
in that little shrine become overpowering. You 
turn away from the jeering black face and hurry 


154 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


out to God’s open air. In the courtyard, just be- 
side the shrine, the birds are twittering on the 
branches of an ancient tree. You sit down on a 
stone step and try to recover your mental equi- 
librium. Somehow, these lines of van Dyke’s flash 
into mind: 


“ Lost, long ago, that garden bright and pure, 
Lost, that calm day too perfect to endure, 
And lost the child-like love, that worshipped 

and was sure! | 
For men have dulled their eyes with sin, 
And dimmed the light of heaven with doubt, 
And built their temple walls to shut Thee in, 
And framed their iron creeds to shut Thee out.” 


And you think of ancient India with its worship 
of the sun and moon and wind, and other clean, 
elemental things, now degenerated, into graven im- 
ages of gods and goddesses, many of whom are 
vulgar and vicious and worshipped with revolting 
rites. You look at the constant line of pilgrims 
from all parts of India, pressing into the shrine 
and coming out glorified after their visit to the 
little black stone image. And a great wave of de- 
pression sweeps over you, for in all that great, 
holy city, there is not a single Christian light burn- 
ing, not a Christian man, woman or child, to point 
the hungry and credulous heart of the pilgrims to 
“some better thing.” 


XII 
COMMUNION SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY 


BLAZING mid-day in mid-winter in mid- 
A India. A crude country road wending its 

wilful way between two villages at the 
“back of beyond.” A comical cavalcade heading 
for church service. 

A white woman, sheltered by blue glasses, a sun- 
hat, and a parasol, sits in a chair which is fastened 
to two long bamboo poles and shouldered by four 
Indian men. A fifth man trots alongside carrying 
a bundle which contains several kinds of sweet- 
meats, a Horlick’s Malted Milk bottle filled with 
raisin water, a loaf of white bread, and an un- 
breakable thermos flask. A white man on foot 
brings up the rear. 

Never before have I experienced the sensation of 
being mistaken for a corpse. But it so happens 
that the Lingayet sect carry their dead shoulder- 
high in similar fashion, with the body gaily decked 
out and propped up in a sitting posture, and the 
head fastened to the back of a chair-like frame. 
The only difference in my case (from a distance) 
was the substitution of a parasol for the regula- 
tion bunch of plantain leaves which ought to have 
waved above my dead head. I therefore took the 
precaution to wiggle my parasol vigorously when 
approaching any onlookers, in order to testify to 


the liveliness of the apparent corpse. 
155 


156 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


The convoy, being unusual in this part of the 
country, caused a mixture of amazement and con- 
sternation to man and beast alike. In one place it 
was the last straw to an already balky bullock 
drawing a plough. The bearers lowered me hastily 
with a bump, and we had to stand motionless by 
the side of the road while the owner disentangled 
the terrified animal from its traces and let it bolt 
past us. 

It sounds simple to be carried in a chair—a sort 
of superior manner of gliding through space; but 
as a matter of fact it was like riding a tricky horse. 
The untrained bearers proceeded at an irregular 
trot, no two of them in step. Whenever a shoulder 
grew tired, its owner promptly raised his end of 
the pole clear over his head to the other shoulder. 
These aberrations occurring frequently and at 
spasmodic intervals, my meditations would be 
rudely interrupted by a sudden lurch towards any 
one of the four corners of the chair, and my heart 
would go pit-a-pat until the normal balance was 
regained. Yet I found this an excellent mode of 
viewing the countryside and of observing the coun- 
tryfolks as they passed us on the road or stopped 
in their field work to gaze at us. 

On the edge of the village we skirt a broad, shal- 
low pool where most of the population seems to 
be washing itself or its clothes, and in which bul- 
locks, buffaloes and goats are also disporting them- 
selves. Under a spreading neem—not a chestnut- 


‘SSALSVOLNG FHL Wow ATHALLN]—SNVILSIMH) HO dNod®) V7 

















Ph! 


} 
* 

* 

| 
+ 
i 
if 
; 
- 
‘ 





e 
; 5 CL 
" _ ud y . 7 : 


« 


ee 










COMMUNION SUNDAY 157 


tree—the village smithy stands. We recognize it 
by the huge pair of bellows worked by a chain, a 
stick, and a pulley. Some youngsters stand close 
by watching the big wheel-rim lying in the 
coals, glowing red-hot. They want to see the 
sparks fly when the smith will come and haul it 
out and start hammering it. 

Outside the next house a woman squats on the 
ground making fuel-cakes. She mixes straw and 
manure and plenty of water, pats out a round flat 
cake, and then dauhs it by a dexterous turn of 
hand on to the wall of her house. Here it will 
dry in the sun and make excellent fuel. 

Next door to this, the family cooking is in 
progress. In one corner of the little porch sits a 
daughter or daughter-in-law of the house doing 
the grinding. With her left hand she takes a quan- 
tity of grain and pours it into the small hole in 
top of the upper millstone, while her right hand 
grasps the wooden handle and propels it round and 
round and round and round. She meanwhile sings 
a grinding ditty—grinding in more ways than one, 
for it is hardly less screechy than the screechy mill- 
stones. These grinding ditties, unintelligible to the 
ordinary listener, have been handed down through 
countless generations. Her mother sits at the other 
end of the porch doing the cooking on an open 
fireplace. It is fascinating to watch her take a 
handful of millet meal, mix it with a little water 
on a wooden platter, knead it, and roll it out into 


158 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


a thin flat cake, which she then takes between her 
hands held vertically in the attitude of praying, and 
pats round and round till it is just the right con- 
sistency. ‘Then she quickly throws it on an iron 
plate on the fire where she will brown it first on 
one side and then on the other. A pile of newly- 
baked breads stands in a basket beside her. These 
unseasoned millet breads are the staple food of 
millions in Western India and are usually eaten 
with well-spiced vegetables. We may be perfectly 
sure that our five bearers have each a few such 
breads tied up in their little cloth bundles for their 
mid-day lunch. 

But now we turn a corner, and a camel lying 
tethered in his owner’s yard scrambles to his feet 
with a startled grunt, stretches out his ungainly 
neck, and stamps on the ground with a ridiculous 
air of indignant enquiry. And just beyond him 
and outside the village gate stands the temple of 
Maruti, the monkey-god and the patron of villages. 
As we pass his open door we catch a glimpse of 
his hideous, leering stone image daubed with red 
paint, with his long tail curled up towards his head, 
and with pathetic little oblations of flowers and 
cocoanuts spread before it. 

We leave the precincts of the village and head 


for the open country. Just here it is bare and 


brown, but we soon come to cotton fields. The 
bushes are of a low species averaging two feet 
high, and they have evidently been picked. Only 


es 


COMMUNION SUNDAY 159 


a few stray bolls still stick to them or lie scattered 
on the ground. We remember the snow-like moun- 
tains of raw cotton which we saw heaped up out- 
side the ginning mills in the town we passed 
through yesterday. Then the road winds ‘“ among 
the fields of yellow, yellow corn,” the corn being 
the jawart, a species of millet known in some parts 
of America as “ Kaffir corn.” The stalks grow 
five or six feet high and are topped by a clump of 
small, bead-like grains, a thousand or so to the 
head. Though the fields look like our own corn 
fields from a distance, the illusion is spoiled by 
the scarecrow—a resplendent figure in brilliant tur- 
ban in place of the familiar tattered hat and old 
pipe, and also by little platforms of straw sup- 
ported on four sticks, where the farmer or his 
hireling sits all day and backs up the scarecrow by 
frightening off the birds. 

The heat has been trying so far, but now a wel- 
come oasis of green breaks the monotony of the 
shadeless land. We soon enter a mango grove 
and enjoy the shelter of the enormous bushy trees 
with their glossy green leaves and their fragrant, 
spirea-like blossoms. We stop and rest a moment 
by the well which accounts for this luxuriance of 
growth, and our human horses take the opportunity 
to water themselves. We watch with interest the 
old-fashioned mode of irrigation still in progress. 
A dozen bullocks, yoked in three groups of two 
pairs each, amble down a slope and thereby draw 


160 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


up the water in three huge leathern buckets which, 
on reaching the top of the well, suddenly open out 
at their lower extremity and let the water rush 
down through earthen runnels to the thirsty fields. 
Then the animals are backed up the slope again 
while the empty buckets wobble down into the 
well for another load. The driver assists opera- 
tions by occasional yells and whacks, by twisting 
of tails and by a plaintive sing-song which no 
doubt serves the same purpose as the women’s 
grinding songs. The creak of the pulley is an 
added stimulus to the bullocks and an indispensable 
part of the whole process. Some friends of ours 
were ofice camping near a well, and the continual 
creak of the pulley so got on the lady’s nerves that 
her husband went over to the well, climbed out on 
the platform supporting the huge pulley, and oiled 
the wheel. The stolid farmer gazed at him with- 
out comprehension and made no objection, but 
when he started to drive his bullocks again and 
discovered that the pulley was silent, he took up a 
handful of sand and threw it on the wheel to 
produce the requisite music—and it did! 

Just last month, our bearers inform us, a man 
was killed at this very spot. A rope broke and he 
was precipitated into the well, striking his head 
against the stone sides. He was the poorest of the 
poor, and of course left a wife and numerous chil- 
dren. And there is no workmen’s compensation! 
But our sad thoughts are dispersed when we catch 


COMMUNION SUNDAY 161 


sight of an urchin by the side of the road. Near 
the well is a fine sugar-cane grove, and some of 
the cane must be ready now, for this youngster is 
ecstatically chewing at one end of a stalk far bigger 
than himself, with the leafy end of it resting on 
the ground. 

And so, rested and refreshed, we proceed on our 
journey. 

We watch a man ploughing in a field with a 
team of one bullock and one buffalo unequally 
yoked together by a primitive wooden yoke, and 
we picture Abraham on the plains of Mamre. 
Then we notice, stalking ahead of us, a dignified 
matronly buffalo with a strange protuberance on 
her back—a protuberance from which two append- 
ages occasionally emerge and wave and disappear 
again. As we approach, the mystery resolves it- 
self into a boy lying flat on his stomach along the 
bony ridge of the buffalo’s back and kicking his 
heels joyfully in the air. As he hears us he sits 
up and begins to take notice. He hastily straddles 
his novel steed and guides it to the side of the road 
to let us pass. Then here comes another rider on 
another mount—a villager on bullock-back. His 
earthly possessions are in two bulky bundles bal- 
anced on either side of the animal. He himself 
sits in the middle with his legs uncomfortably 
stretched towards the face of the bullock, which 
he steers by means of a rope through its nostrils. 

Then we pass a few red-painted stones by the 


162 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


wayside—a local shrine, and we call to mind the 
experience of a missionary friend. When out 
hunting one day he climbed a little hillock and 
stood on a pile of stones to spy out whether there 
were any deer in the neighbourhood. He inad- 
vertently dislodged a stone, and it rolled down the 
slope. He was horrified to notice that it was red- 
painted and therefore holy, and was thankful that 
no one had observed him, otherwise there might 
have been trouble over the sacrilege. Some years 
later he happened to be back in that particular 
place and noticed an unfamiliar shrine with a stone 
inside. He turned to a villager standing near by 
and asked him about it. | 
“Why, sahib,” he replied, “ didn’t you hear what 
happened? About three years ago our god must 
have got angry with us, for he rolled right down 
the hill and stopped here. We knew from that 
that he wanted this as his new place to stay, so 
we built him this little house, and he has been so 
good to us ever since. The crops have been good, 
and we haven’t had any special sickness or any- 
thing. Isn’t it wonderful?” . 
And as we ponder on such gods and their ways 
we notice a grey mass against the glaring blue 
sky—an Indian village and our goal. We ap- 
proach it by a lane lined by dusty cactus bushes. 
We skirt the outcaste quarter with its shabby 
houses of mud and straw. We turn a corner and 
are confronted by a substantial stone building. It 


COMMUNION SUNDAY 163 


really would be more accurate to say that the back 
of the building confronts us; for here, as some- 
times happens in the Emerald Isle, the front of 
the building is round at the back. So we go round 
the back of the building to the front, and find a 
large, verandah-like structure with stone walls, a 
mud floor, and a mud roof supported by roughly- 
hewn wooden pillars. 

A goodly number of our old friends have al- 
ready gathered, so we greet them and make our 
way to the string cot which has been placed for us 
in a corner. The bottle of raisin water and the 
loaf of bread are put on the rickety table beside 
the Bible and hymn-book. Next, an elder rings 
the bell (by means of a rope fastened to the 
tongue) which hangs from a cross-beam. ‘The peo- 
ple appear in twos and threes, and salaam to us 
as they come in. Then the service begins—a sim- 
ple service for simple people. 

The men-folks squat on the floor in front, with 
their turbans removed and placed beside them. 
The women crouch at the back of the room, with 
their faces partly concealed by the loose end of 
their saris. Children swarm everywhere and crawl 
and tumble noisily about the floor. Cows and bul- | 
locks and buffaloes and goats and dogs stroll past 
the opening or recline on the threshold or even at- 
tempt to pay us a visit. None of these trifles dis- 
turbs the equanimity of the audience, for they are 
all so much a part of everyday life. 


164 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


I look over the company with kindling memories. 
It is a long time since I was here. .Changes have 
taken place. Some honoured friends are gone. 
Others are visibly older and weaker. Entirely new 
babies are of course in evidence—lots of them. 
: I think back over the years of acquaint- 
anceship, of fellowship. 

The dusky preacher was more than once beaten 
because of his religion and like Peter he converted 
his gaoler—the Brahman Govindrao. 

Near him sits a man whose four brothers and 
sisters, on becoming Christians, were poisoned by 
their Hindu relatives. He himself, an outcaste of 
the lowest grade, is now teaching a school for both 
caste and outcaste pupils in what was once a bigoted 
village. 

That other teacher lost his beautiful wife in the 
influenza epidemic. He had to dig the grave and 
bury her all by himself, because no one in the vil- 
lage would touch a Christian corpse. 

At the back of the room sits the mealy-mouthed 
woman who once, on behalf of the Christian com- 
munity, presented me with a pair of silver bangles, 
and then stole my hand-mirror as her share of the 
spoil. I recovered my property by sending a man 
fifty miles up the line for it, but the woman has 
never forgiven me for forgetting that I gave it to 
her as baksheesh! 

And oh, there is Ranubai, sitting at a becomingly 
modest distance from her husband Razaram. We 


COMMUNION SUNDAY 165 


first saw Ranubai four years ago when she turned 
up at the Travellers’ Bungalow where we were 
staying. She was in great distress, having just 
lost her husband from influenza, and having come 
to live with her brother. We sympathized suitably, 
we thought. A month later we happened to visit 
that same bungalow again, and we found Ranubai 
and . . . the husband! 

“Why, Ranubai,” I cried, “what does this 
mean? You told us your husband had died.” 

“True, mudumsahib,” she replied, “ but it was 
like this. He was lying very ill with the influenza 
and I was sure he was going to die, so I left him 
with his sister. But, you see, he has turned up 
again like a bad penny.” And she sighed. 

As it transpired on further enquiry, Ranubai 
and Razaram, having lost their respective spouses 
seven years previously, had been living “ without 
benefit of clergy.” ‘They by and by became Chris- 
tians, were married in orthodox fashion, and are 
now respected members of the community. 

And now I catch sight of Gyanoba, the old 
rascal; and a wave of most unholy joy sweeps over 
me as I note the wretched condition of his wife 
and children. For there were two wives in this 
family, the second having been acquired after a 
false report of the death of the first, who sub- 
sequently turned up and demanded her conjugal 
rights. The amenable man let both wives remain, 
but one was the Rachel and the other the Leah. 


166 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


This woman in front of me was the Rachel, and 
she saw to it in times of scarcity that she and her 
children got all the food going. It was the Leah 
who once came to us for advice when we were 
camping out in the district; and as the husband 
refused to play up, we had sent her and her six 
emaciated youngsters by railway to our bungalow, 
fed and clothed them, and finally sent them on their 
way rejoicing to a big town where the mother got 
work ina mill. She is now flourishing and happy, 
and all her children are well cared for. Her rival, 
whom I see before me, is shrunken by deficient 
food and crumpled up by disease, and she leans 
heavily on a cane. Leah is surely avenged. 

As I meditate, the preacher finishes his sermon. 
The raisin water is poured into two metal cups. 
The white loaf is crumbled on to a brass platter. 
Thus the elements are dispensed, in simple, crude 
fashion; but I think that the One who has promised 
to be present where two or three are gathered to- 
gether in His name, is surely there in the midst of 
His humble followers. 

Service over, we distribute the sweetmeats, chat 
with our friends, and exchange news. And then, 
home again in the cool of the evening—“ home ” 
to the Travellers’ Bungalow. 

And now, the day’s work done, we sit on the 
verandah watching the wonderful translucent col- 
ouring in the Western sky—bands of palest blue 
and flax and amber and orange and red merging 


COMMUNION SUNDAY 167 


imperceptibly into each other. Against this back- 
ground two trees stand out—on the right a bushy 
neem and on the left a tall, tapering sisal plant. 
Directly between them shines a solitary star. 
Away to the north a blazing fire indicates where 
the farmer is guarding his crops from night 
prowlers, both biped and quadruped. A great 
flapping and fluttering startles us as a couple of 
huge bats fly restlessly backwards and forwards. 
Then they dart towards the sisal plant, seize a 
branch, hang upside down, swing to and fro like 
pendulums, then finally close their wings and sub- 
side into two motionless black spots on the land- 
scape. From the distance come indistinct com- 
posite noises of village life—the beating of drums, 
the shouts of men and women, the cry of a child, 
the creak of a bullock cart, the whining of dogs, 
and, farther off, the howl of a jackal. 

It is the same old India. Centuries ago there 
were the same primitive carts and ploughs, the same 
castes and outcastes, the same gods and goddesses. 
For how many more centuries will the old ways 
prevail? After all, what has been accomplished? 
What is that handful of Christians three miles off 
compared to the millions still untouched? Are we 
tapping in vain against an impregnable fortress? 

But the darkness has fallen swiftly. Our sisal 
plant and our bats and the long road trailing past 
the bungalow—these fade out in an all-pervading 
blackness. There is nothing to see on earth now, 


168 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


so perforce we look up at the sky. Ah, there they 
are, the candle-lights of heaven twinkling down at 
us. Surely they are trying to heliograph a mes- 
sage. What is the code? Faith. What is the 
message? I cannot decipher it. I cannot spell it 
out. But I think the stars are bidding us look up 
and not down. 


XIII 
THROUGH THE FIERY FURNACE 


(A HERO TELLS HIS OWN STORY) 


A O, ’mnotahero. I’m not even a brave 
N man. I’m just a poor, ignorant, 
illiterate villager who gave his heart 

to Jesus and had the privilege of suffering for Him. 
“Vou see, I’m a Mahar, one of the outcastes. 

I lived all my life in a Native State in India, in a 
very small village, or rather, outside the village, 
for, of course, we outcastes are not allowed to live 
within the walls. Like most of the people of 
India I was born and brought up a Hindu. | 
worshipped the monkey-god who sits at the gate 
of every village, and the red-painted stones in their 
little shrines. I kept a plant of the sacred tulst 
{sweet balsam] outside my door, and my women- 
folks tended it and worshipped it every morning. 
I enjoyed all the Hindu festivals with their drum- 
beating and cymbal-clanging and gay processions 
with shouting and laughing and all sorts of queer 
ceremonies. Of course we outcastes could not go 
farther than the door of the temples, for we are 
outcaste even from the presence of the gods and 


goddesses of the caste people. 
169 


1'70 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


“There were Christians in a group of villages 
not far from me. They weren’t all good people, 
and some of them were quite bad; but, on the 
whole, they were a much better and happier group 
than we Hindu outcastes. They were almost 
entirely from the Mangs—the other big section of 
outcastes, so of course I despised them for that as 
well as for being Christians. But once in a while » 
I went to their services, and I heard their white 
sahib tell about the God who wanted people to love 
Him as if He were a great, kind Father. And it 
all seemed very wonderful to me, and by and by I 
began to see how foolish it was to be afraid of bits 
of wood and stone that other men—human like 
myself—had made with their own hands. I talked 
this over with the Christian pastor and asked him 
many questions, for, you see, I can’t read, so books 
were of no use to me. As I squatted in the fields 
weeding, or cutting the grain with my little sickle, 
or as I drove the herds out to pasture, I would 
think and think and think. And then, somehow, it 
all came clear to me that if I wanted peace and 
happiness I must give my heart to Jesus. I knew 
there would be trouble, but that didn’t seem to 
matter so long as I did what I knew to be right. 
One blessed day the white sahib came and baptised 
me and my wife and my five children. How happy 
I was! And I have been happy ever since. 

“A few days after the sahib had gone, the 
trouble began. The patil [headman] and the 


THROUGH THE FIERY FURNACE 1%1 


kulkarni [village recorder] are both against this 
new religion, for it makes even an outcaste feel 
self-conscious and independent, and of course no 
outcaste has any business to think he has a soul 
or any individuality. It was a marvellous discov- 
ery to me that I not only had a soul, but that my 
soul was precious in God’s sight—as precious as 
that of a caste man. 

“One day my wife went as usual into the vil- 
lage to buy oil for the cooking and a handful of 
salt. She carried the oil in a little earthenware 
pot and she held the salt in a corner of her sart. 
The patil’s brother met her. ‘ What are you doing 
here?’ he cried. ‘We don’t want dogs of Chris- 
tians in our village. Get out! And don’t dare to 
show your face inside this village again.’ And 
with that he knocked the pot out of her hand so 
that it fell to the ground and broke into a thousand 
pieces. ‘hen he struck the salt out of her sar1, 
and kicked her till she turned and ran home. You 
can imagine how I felt when she told me, but our 
Master had suffered more than that, so how could 
we complain? 

“ Things were rather hard for us after that. We 
had to walk six miles to the nearest village for our 
food supplies. I could get no field work, for the 
farmers had been forbidden to employ me. We 
were near starving, but my father and brothers 
helped us. Then one day 1 was horrified to dis- 
cover that I had been deprived of my Mahar-ki— 


172 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


my birthright as a Mahar that gave me a share 
in the duties and the privileges and the perquisites 
and the ground of the Mahars. My enemies had 
bribed the police officer, and he had erased my 
name from the official records. I was disinherited 
—a nobody, not even an outcaste! It was a severe 
blow, and entirely unexpected, but our Master had 
suffered more than this, so how could we com- 
plain? 

“Then the villagers began to tell me that they 
would kill me and my family—that, if necessary, 
they would burn me out. They simply did not 
want any Christians in their village and they 
weren’t going to have us stay. Sahib urged us to 
go away for a time until the opposition should die 
down, and promised me work and protection be- 
side him in Barispoor, but I felt that Jesus wanted 
us to stay right on there, so we did. 

“One midnight as we were sleeping in our little 
one-roomed mud house I was awakened by a 
strange smell, and on jumping up discovered that 
the roof was on fire. It was made of dried sugar- 
cane stalks, and you could never believe how the 
fire could eat itup. I yelled and wakened my wife 
and my five children, and we rushed to the door. 
But the door was fastened from the outside! 

“We were caught like rats in a burning trap. 
The flames were dipping down towards us as they 
rushed all over the thatch roof roaring and spit- 
ting. There was no hope through the window, for 


THROUGH THE FIERY FURNACE 178 


it was only eight inches square. Oh, my God, have 
my wife and my five children and I to be burned 
up alive? Oh, my God, why don’t my brothers 
come and help us? My brothers had heard our 
cries and rushed to their doors. But my brothers’ 
doors were also fastened from the outside! ‘The 
iron chain on the door had been put over the iron 
loop on the door-frame, and no amount of pulling 
or pushing would loosen it. I was ready to die 
for Jesus. But oh, what a death!—to be roasted 
alive in my own little home! And my wife and 
my five children! Oh, my God, save at least them! 

“ Our door suddenly began to rattle. It yielded. 
It was pulled partly open. I threw my five chil- 
dren out, one by one, pushed through my scream- 
ing wife, and then followed. There was my old 
deaf father waiting for us. He had happened to 
be sleeping outside that night, and when my ene- 
mies came and fastened my door and my brothers’ 
doors from the outside, they never noticed him. 
It had taken some time for our cries to waken him, 
for he is as deaf as a doorpost; but when he saw 
what had happened he tore at the chain till it 
loosened, though his hands were all burned with 
the falling thatch. But now we were out and safe 
—I and my wife and my five children. 

“Then I wondered if we couldn’t save our most 
precious possession. We had no silver or gold or 
jewels, but we had a doorframe, which we had 
bought after much pinching and scraping when we 


174 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


built our new house. We opened my brothers’ 
doors, and they and I tore a hole in the mud wall 
of my house and managed to loosen the doorframe 
and haul it out. It was the only thing saved. One 
outsider—a potter who happened to be visiting the 
village—was the only person who helped us. At 
a safe distance stood a group of villagers, laughing 
and enjoying the fun! 

“T had strange thoughts as I stood trembling 
with one of my children in my arms, watching our 
little new house burn down and with it everything 
I possessed on earth except the doorframe—some 
clothes, a few cooking vessels, and a store of grain. 
But God in His mercy had spared our lives, and for 
that I was extremely thankful. Besides, our Mas- 
ter had suffered more than that, so how should we 
complain? 

“ Sahib had most unexpectedly arrived the night 
before at the Travellers’ Bungalow five miles away, 
so I ran over in the early morning, and he came 
back with me and saw the still-smouldering ruins. 
He went at once to the patil and bearded him in 
his den and told him he was directly responsible 
for this and would be made to suffer for it. Then 
sahib suggested that we hold the service here to- 
day—for it was the holy Sabbath—instead of in 
the little Christian church three miles off. So he 
sent round messengers to the different villages to 
call the Christians together; and in the afternoon 
we all gathered and worshipped and praised God 


THROUGH THE FIERY FURNACE 175 


right there by the ruins of my little house. And 
‘somehow I felt so happy, for I had come safely 
through the fiery furnace—I and my wife and my 
five children, and God had been good to us. 

“ Next day sahib and I went to the headquarters 
of the district, thirty-five miles away, and saw the 
head official of the whole district. He is a Mo- 
hammedan and seemed very indignant over the af- 
fair. He took a full report and promised that 
justice would be done, so I went back to my village. 

“ A few days later a police officer came to make 
enquiries. I think the pati had bribed him, for he 
made fun of everything I said. But I kept my 
temper and just said that I had given my heart to 
Jesus and that nothing else mattered. By and by 
he got angry and said I was telling lies about the 
number of things that had been burned up in my 
house; so he took a stick and beat me all over my 
body and kept me in custody all day as though J 
had been the criminal. I figured it all out that 
there was evidently no chance of justice under this 
officer and that the best thing would be to escape 
if possible. So when darkness fell and my guard 
wasn’t watching I slipped away into the black night 
out of reach. 

“Tran and I ran and I ran, though my whole 
body was aching from the beating. I ran four 
miles to the village where there was a Christian 
teacher. He advised me to go right to sahib and 
scraped together enough money for my railway 


176 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


fare; so I ran on another eight miles so as to 
reach a station where the police would not be 
watching for me, and I took the train for eighty- 
five miles to where sahib was, And when he came 
out of his bungalow to meet me, I just fell on his 
breast and cried my heart out. You see, I’m no 
hero. I’m not even a brave man. I cried just like 
a baby, for it all rushed over me again—that awful 
time when I and my wife and my five children 
crouched in the burning house—shut in! 

“ Sahib’s eyes glinted very fiercely when he heard 
the way the police officer had behaved, and I knew 
that he would get justice for me. I was very ap- 
prehensive as to what might be happening to my 
family after I had run away, so next day sahib 
sent a big strong man to bring my wife and my 
five children and also my old father. And they 
told me just what I had expected. When the 
brutal police officer heard I had run away he sent 
for my wife and questioned her; and when she 
said she knew nothing about my escape he seized 
her by the hair and threw her down on the ground 
and tramped on her and kicked her. Then he beat 
my old father and my youngest brother. 

“ But what does it matter now? My wife and 
my five children are safe with me, and we are stay- 
ing under sahib’s protection until things quieten 
down in my village. But, you know, God is using 
all this trouble to turn other people to Him. In 
my own village alone nine other Mahars are beg- 


THROUGH THE FIERY FURNACE 177 


ging for baptism, and I am so glad, for I want 
them to be as happy as I have been since 1 gave 
my heart to Jesus.” 


That is the story of the heroic Laxman as he 
tells it himself, squatting on the floor, with his 
hands clasped in front of him and with great tears 
rolling down his cheeks as he relives the experi- 
ence in the burning house. 

But that is not the end of the story. 

Even if poor Laxman had been perfectly con- 
tent to spend the rest of his life away from his 
village, Bill had no intention of letting an outrage 
like that pass unpunished. We knew that our 
whole district was watching to see what would hap- 
pen. If Laxman were not avenged, then other 
Hindus in other villages would think they could 
treat the Christians in the same way, and would 
burn them out and get rid of them with impunity. 
So Bill once more went to the headquarters of the 
district, saw the officials, and followed up his visit 
with more than one urgent letter. We did not 
expect any immediate effect, for we knew, from 
many a hard experience, that even the simplest 
case may take months or even years to get into 
court. But we did get a shock when a summons 
came to Laxman to appear at headquarters and 
answer a charge brought by the paiil of his village 
that he, Laxman, had maliciously set his own house 
on fire and then accused the villagers! 


178 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


The charge was simply preposterous—so ludi- 
crous as to be laughable in ordinary circumstances. 
But these were not ordinary circumstances. We 
were dealing with a Native State which the long 
arm of British justice cannot touch, where bribery 
and corruption are rife, and where palms are pe- 
culiarly responsive to grease. The patil was a rich 
man with a reputation and position to lose, while 
Laxman was a poor outcaste who had not a cent 
with which to make his way smooth for him. 

Laxman was thrown into the greatest pertur- 
bation when he got the summons. ‘This was the 
hardest blow yet—to suffer as he had done and then 
be summoned to answer a criminal charge. He 
refused at first to move. He insisted on hiding 
somewhere in British Territory. But Bill’s blood 
was up. He vowed he would see this thing through 
no matter to what extremities he might have to go. 

0 we despatched poor, terror-stricken Laxman 
directly, with a letter saying that the Rev. William 
Wilberforce would follow the next day, while we 
went round by several villages and picked up the 
Christian pastor—a very clever and diplomatic 
man who knows not a little about the tricks of the 
trade in the law courts. We reached headquarters 
on the morning of the day fixed for the trial. I 
stayed in the Travellers’ Bungalow, and watched 
Bill and the pastor go off to the court with some 
trepidation. 

Hour after hour passed. I never worry, but I 


‘HSIUVg YNO NI anosow WMalLavag dNv d1Q NV 











: f 
og Nal a 


a= 


rae , ‘ . 7 o . % ab rt ’ at. 
tq ‘ ; ; re 


: ; Cis 
F ; le » wens Ay 
, ¥ ; 





THROUGH THE FIERY FURNACE 179 


began to get apprehensive. I thought of all poor 
Laxman had suggested in the way of possible poi- 
son and other means of getting rid of anybody . 
obstreperous. I felt sure that if things had gone 
all right, Bill would have been back long before 
this. A Native State often resents any white man’s 
“interference.” Poor Bill! Maybe he was having 
a bad time too. 

About five o’clock in the afternoon I heard a sud- 
den “ toot-toot”” and rushed to the door in time 
to see our Ford swing round from the main road. 
In it were Bill and the pastor and Laxman, and I 
could see even from that distance that they were 
all grinning from ear to ear. “ How did it come 
outy l- eried. . “ What about Laxman?” 
“Everything’s all right,” shouted Bill, “ wait and 
we'll tell you.” 

But when they got into the bungalow they were 
too excited to speak intelligibly. We all four sat 
down to a tardy tea. Poor old Laxman, who had 
never sat on a chair or taken a meal at a table be- 
fore, choked and spluttered and laughed outright 
as he tried to tell me what had happened. Then 
the pastor would break in with his version, and 
Bill would interrupt to tell some tit-bit, and very 
often the three were all speaking at once. It was 
with difficulty that I pieced the tale together. 

When Bill and the pastor went along to the courts 
they were sidetracked into the house of the chief 
official—a polished Mohammedan gentleman—as 


180 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


most of the high-up officials are. They were 
treated to innumerable cups of tea, and their host 
kept them chatting pleasantly for hours on every 
subject under the sun except the matter in hand. 
The case must meanwhile be going on in the court, 
and Bill wondered how things were going. When 
Bill got an opportunity he related Laxman’s story 
and showed how preposterous the charge was, but 
his host did not seem to be greatly interested, and 
Bill felt sure that he knew what the verdict was to 
be. This naturally made him a little anxious. 

In the late afternoon, the official casually re- 
marked that he would now call Laxman and tell 
him the verdict. Laxman appeared and stood by 
the door, as white as any brown man can be. The 
judgment was that the charge against Laxman was 
dismissed, and that the pati] was ordered to have 
Laxman’s house rebuilt free of charge! And then 
the official informed Bill that the brutal police offi- 
cer who had maltreated them was transferred to 
another post far away, and that a new officer—a 
college friend of his own son—had been appointed 
in his place, with special instructions to protect and 
help the Christians! 

The news had spread like wildfire through our 
district. Patils and other officials may dislike the 
Christians but they will not persecute them with 
impunity. And the poor outcastes—both Chris- 
tian and Hindu, feel that a new day of justice is 
dawning for them. 


XIV 
FURLOUGH! 


LANG and clatter! Rush and roar! 
Swish and swirl! 

Bill and I stood, as breathless with ex- 
citement as any country cousins, on the edge of the 
curb in Lexington Avenue, New York. Could 
we, dare we step across? We did. But we had 
miscalculated. A great, bellowing motor-truck 
suddenly loomed out of nowhere and bore down 
upon us! Bill grasped my hand and drew me to 
the right. With the instinct of years in India I 
pulled to the left. Being strong-minded, neither 
of us would let go. And there we danced in the 
middle of the road like a couple of idiotic marion- 
ettes pulled by unseen strings. I glanced at the 
face of the truck-driver. His expression changed 
from annoyance to amusement, and he actually 
chuckled as he considerately slowed down and 
watched us scamper like frightened rabbits in front 
of his motor and over to the safe shelter of the 
inviting sidewalk. 

Our first day back in New York! Our first ice- 
cream soda! I’ll never forget them. 
The Grand Central Station was absolutely over- 
181 


182 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 

powering, and we felt like dwarfs in the hall of 
the giants. And the trains all out of sight! Why, 
in dear little old Barispoor the whole town used 
to watch for the morning train careering gaily 
across the main thoroughfare, and we had plenty 
time to catch it if we left the bungalow after the 
whistle blew. And if we happened to be delayed, 
all we had to do was to send a man running to 
hold up the train for us, for we were usually the 
only white passengers. But here were hundreds 
and hundreds of white sahibs strolling round and 
looking at their watches or at the big clock in the 
hall; and the trains were running to schedule 
whether we wanted to go by them or not! 

And that ice-cream soda at one of the station 
fountains! If you want to know how it tasted, 
you will have to deny yourself for seven-and-a-half 
thirsty years. 

Well, here we are, really in America at last. 
How often, under the fragrant trees in the moon- 
lit garden in Barispoor, we had rested in the even- 
ings and planned all the wonderful things we would 
do during furlough. As a matter of fact, it was 
usually I who built the castles in the air. We 
would start out enthusiastically, both of us, and 
then after I had talked for a while and made some 
brilliant suggestion about furlough, I would ask 
Bill’s opinion. Dead silence! Then I would dis- 
cover that Bill, stretched out in his steamer-chair 
and exhausted after his day’s labours, was sound 


FURLOUGH! 183 


asleep! And sometimes my flow of suggestions 
would be rudely interrupted by audible signs of his 
somnolence. But at odd moments during the last 
four years, this coming holiday had loomed on our 
horizon and summoned up entrancing visions of all 
we would see and do. And here we were, almost 
stunned by the fact that our Indian parish, with 
all its perplexities and problems, is, say, eight thou- 
sand miles away! 

Somehow, we had anticipated furlough as a time 
of vegetation; but it turns out to be a hectic round 
of strenuous living—so hectic that we sometimes 
look forward to getting back to work so as to 
rest up a bit! The Rev. William Wilberforce 
preaches numerous sermons both in town and coun- 
try churches, and I never look up at him in the 
dignity of pulpit environment and ministerial garb 
confronting a well-dressed audience without pic- 
turing him in camping outfit, sitting on a string 
cot in the dirtiest quarter of a dirty Indian village, 
surrounded by a crowd of ragged but eager brown 
folks. Sometimes we have the privilege of going 
off together for week-ends, and talking in churches, 
Sunday schools, Christian Endeavour societies and 
various clubs or committees. 

It is difficult to sum up the multifarious impres- 
sions left by multifarious experiences, but the sum 
total is one of pleasure and inspiration, and the un- 
bounded hospitality of American homes is a vivid 
memory. We are struck by the genuine and in- 


184 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


telligent interest in missionary work, and never 
cease to marvel at the extended network of so- 
cieties with the one object of keeping our enter- 
prise a live and going concern. It gives us a great 
glow of encouragement to realize that we are part 
and parcel of one of the biggest movements on 
earth, with a fine body of American men and 
women back of us? for in our isolated life at Baris- 
poor we had often felt that ours was a little one- 
horse show not very vitally linked up with world 
affairs. 

Of course we have had amusing examples of 
twisted ideas of our life and work—for instance, 
when we were asked in all seriousness whether we 
enjoyed living on rice and dressing “like the na- 
tives?” 

On another occasion an enthusiastic young lady, 
leader of a Junior Christian Endeavour Society, 
got me to speak to her boys and girls, and when 
chatting with me afterwards remarked, “We're 
awfully interested in what you’ve told us, Mrs. 
Wilberforce; in fact, we’re interested in all mission 
work. But of course we concentrate on our own 
missionary.” 

“ Naturally,” said I. “ Who is she?” 

“ Miss Blank.” 

“ And which country is she in? India, too?” 

My eager young friend looked nonplussed for a 
moment. ‘ No, I think it’s Africa. Wait a min- 
ute. No, I do believe it’s China. Johnny,” she 


FURLOUGH! 185 


called to one of her ardent boys, “isn’t Miss Blank 
in China?” Johnny looked equally uncertain, but 
thought she was. 

Now, how many times had those lively boys and 
girls looked up the location of their missionary, 
how many letters had they written her, when they 
did not so much as know the country she was work- 
ing in? I felt that their sprightly leader missed a 
great opportunity of imparting both geographical 
and world knowledge to her Endeavourers, to say 
nothing of cheering up their missionary by an oc- 
casional message. 

We have invariably found that the churches 
which are lukewarm in their interest and behind in 
their contributions are those which are not linked 
up with an individual missionary with whom they 
can have personal contacts. We were asked to 
speak in a church which had not given a cent to 
missions for years. One of the members said to 
me, “ This year I was asked how much I'd pledge 
for Foreign Missions. I agreed to give ten dol- 
lars. But I’m not in the least interested, for I 
don’t know where that ten dollars is going. Now, 
if our church had charge of a bed in a Chinese 
hospital, or a school in India, or any one definite 
bit of work like that, I’d give gladly, and I’d give 
more—double or treble. What I want, is to follow 
the dollar.” 

I often thought of that remark and found it 
literally true; for wherever a church or a society 


186 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


is linked up with an individual missionary or an 
individual bit of work, interest is alive and intelli- 
gent. And I know from our own personal experi- 
ence the inspiration that comes to a missionary 
when he knows he has a strong and wideawake 
bunch of friends back of him. 

We have come across cases that would be ludi- 
crous if they were not so pathetic—sometimes 
pernicious—cases of absolute ignorance as to con- 
ditions in India coupled with a lack of sufficient 
imagination to realize them when they are de- 
scribed. ‘Ihe worst case of this kind that I met 
was when I tried to increase my medical knowl- 
edge. : 

One of the things I had made up my mind to do 
on furlough was to get in touch with some hos- 
pital that would let me pick up what knowledge I 
could, so as to be able to cope with at least simple 
cases in our huge district. When I saw the mul- 
tiplicity of hospitals and doctors and nurses in our 
civilized America, my heart just ached for poor 
old India with her vast stretches of thousands of 
miles without any medical aid and its millions who 
die every year from preventable causes; and I pic- 
tured the revolution that the advent of just one 
doctor would make in our immediate parish. 
There was no time for any extended medical 
course, but I did think that there must be some 
way of spending a few months in the observation 
of treatments, so that I could at least relieve pain. 


FURLOUGH! 187 


My first attempt at finding a suitable opportunity 
was disastrous. Armed with an introduction and 
an explanation from a Secretary of our Board, I 
proceeded to the social service worker connected 
with a large free dispensary in one of America’s 
busy cities. When I saw the crowds of out-pa- 
tients, my hopes rose high, for it reminded me of 
the sick and the blind and the halt that used to 
flock to us for relief. If I could only sit by some 
doctor as he diagnosed these cases, and get from 
him some simple remedies, I knew that I could 
help thousands of suffering Indians who would 
otherwise go unrelieved. 

The social service worker was a most efficient 
young person who evidently called a spade a spade 
and took life literally. She first looked me over 
from top to toe and then read the letter of intro- 
duction. I could feel her positively bristle with 
disapprobation. She looked at me again with 
piercing grey eyes. 

“ But I understand,” she said, “ that you are not 
a fully qualified medical practitioner.” 

The meek missionary assured her that she was 
not. 

EFFICIENT YOUNG Person: “And you actually 
plan to diagnose cases and give out medicines?” 

Meek Missionary: “ By all means.” 

E.Y. P.: “It is extraordinary! In fact, most 
dangerous.” 

M. M.: “Have you never done so?” 


188 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


EF. Y. P.: “Never! My assistants and I go 
from house to house and when we find sick people 
we either urge them to come here to the dispensary 
or then we send them a doctor.” 

M. M.: “Exactly. That is the right thing to 
do here in a large city with hundreds of doctors. 
But I’m afraid you don’t understand that I’m going 
back to India—to a district where there are twenty 
thousand square miles without a hospital, and two 
and a half million people beyond medical relief.” 

The Meek Missionary paused here, feeling that 
she had made a decided hit, but the unblinking grey 
eyes continued to pierce her without a flicker of 
imagination. Evidently all that the Efficient 
Young Person could realize was the fact that an 
unqualified charlatan wanted to creep by a back 
door into medical practice, and that she herself 
was the Heaven-sent Obstacle to keep her out. 
She hung on to this fact with so much tenacity that 
her mind could grasp nothing else. The Meek 
Missionary followed up her point. ‘“ Suppose,” 
she said, “you found yourself in a place where 
there was no one else to help, would you not give 
out simple medicines? ” 

EK. Y.P.: “May I ask if you ever did so before 
you returned to America? ”’ 

Mo Me so Otten 7 

EF. Y.P.: “And with what after-effects? ” 

M. M.: “Only these—many lives have been 
saved and hundreds of sufferers relieved.” 


FURLOUGH! 189 


E. Y. P.: “And how many casualties due to 
your treatments?” 

Meise 1, Not one.’ 

But the Efficient Young Person was by no means 
exhausted. She had a brilliant brain-wave. 
“Then,” she announced, “ what you really want is 
a course in home nursing. We have an excellent 
class about to begin. I shall be happy to enroll 
you,” and she stretched her hand towards a pile of 
enrollment forms. The Meek Missionary hastened 
to explain that she had “ home-nursed ” from her 
youth upwards, and that an elaborate knowledge of 
how to turn a bed and adjust the ventilation was 
not quite the thing needed among a people of no 
beds and no ventilation—where the patient simply 
rolled himself in a blanket and slept on a mud floor 
in a windowless room. And then she pointed— 
dramatically, as she fondly thought—to a long line 
of waiting out-patients, and said that all she wanted 
was to sit by some doctor as he diagnosed cases, 
and get from him some simple prescriptions. Just 
a little knowledge, she pleaded, would work mir- 
acles in her needy district. But the Efficient Young 
Person had her trump card up her sleeve and she 
produced it now with an air of triumphant finality. 
“ Madam,” she said, “I can do nothing whatever 
for you. You do not seem to realize that “a little 
knowledge is a dangerous thing?!” 

The Meek Missionary was completely van- 


190 OUR PARISH IN INDIA 


quished. She said a hurried “ good-morning ”’ and 
fled! 

Later on, more imaginative officials helped me 
to imbibe some elementary knowledge in a large 
institution, which I have no doubt will prove im- 
mensely helpful later on; and a busy dentist used 
up hours of his valuable time giving us an idea of 
rudimentary dentistry, especially the art of pulling 
teeth. 

In other ways, too, the furlough has been im- 
mensely worth while. Bill and I feel that our 
minds have undergone a thorough spring-cleaning, 
and our outlook is freshened and expanded im- 
measurably. Our dilapidated wardrobe has been 
replenished, and our mailing list of real or hypo- 
thetical friends has swelled to several hundreds. 
We have also become acutely sympathetic with the 
trials and troubles of our Mission Board, and we 
congratulate ourselves on being merely overworked 
missionaries in a remote corner of the globe, and 
not harassed Secretaries at the Home Base. 

Yes, we have enjoyed every minute. We have 
dropped back into where we belong and have be- 
gun to feel at home again in the old familiar en- 
vironment. But something is tugging at our sub- 
conscious minds all the time; something is pulling 
at our heart-strings. ‘The great rolling prairies of 
Western India; the thirsty, barren land; the gor- 
geous tropical sunsets; the camping out under the 
wide and starry sky; our fragrant garden in the 


FURLOUGH! 191 


moonlight; the poor outcastes who have no helper 
but ourselves; and—last but not least—our be- 
loved friend Krishna the cook and our adorable 
doggie Fuzzle—these are all calling to us to come 
over again to them and love them, and we are ac- 
tually beginning to count the hours till we shall 
once more step within the bounds of our Indian 
parish, thousands of miles away. 


Printed in the United States of America 





Wary be ey 

; iby ‘ ata orl iy q 
Ah ie 7 ce ie 

ne ue) te 


e — = Tl 
o* _ - 


<= 


> 


a og a We 


a OO  <— 


7 
a 


& 


' 4: d 
thes hs 





F é eS 


oa MAT dae 
A i Ws 
a) < raid 7 


India; lights and shadows 


Oo 
ie 
ow 
a 
ws. 
LN 
nas 
Ss 
ao 












































